transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to
get at the fresh air. Laughable as many of them seem today, with their
improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had
not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by
the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement,
and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. They
appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof
Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their
demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of
the _Naturton_, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic
emotions, pity and terror. This spirit infected not merely the
department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction
in general. It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like
Beckford's "Vathek," Godwin's "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams," Mrs.
Shelley's "Frankenstein," Shelley's "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvine the
Rosicrucian," and the American Charles Brockden Brown's "Ormond" and
"Wieland," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and
ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the _elixir vitae_, or
who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in
their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying
their burning hearts in their hands.

Lockhart, however, denies that "Götz von Berlichingen" had anything in
common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the
_Anti-Jacobin_. He says that it was a "broad, bold, free, and most
picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events." He
thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with "their forays upon
each other's domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the
captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord,"
Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its