we have horror heaped on horror’s head; mouldering abbeys, haunted castles, banditti, illuminati, sorcerers, conspirators, murderous monks and phantom friars, apparitions without number until the despairing reviewers cried aloud: “Surely the misses themselves must be tired of so many stories of ghosts and murders.” We have such titles as the famous Horrid Mysteries; The Midnight Groan; The Abbot of Montserrat, or, The Pool of Blood; The Demon of Venice; The Convent Spectre; The Hag of the Mountains;[27] and a hundred such lurid nomenclatures, but until we come to Polidori’s novel which will be considered later, nowhere, so far as I am aware, do we meet with the Vampire in the realm of Gothic fancy. So vast, however, is this fascinating library and so difficult to procure are these novels of a century and a quarter ago that I hesitate sweepingly to assert that this theme was entirely unexploited. There may be some romance which I have not had the good fortune to find where a hideous vampire swoops down upon his victims, but if such be the case I am at least prepared to say that the Vampire was not generally known to Gothic lore, and had his presence made itself felt in the sombre chapters of one votary of this school I think he would have re-appeared on many occasions, for the writers were as accustomed to convey from one another with an easy assurance, as they were wont deftly to plunder the foreign mines. Inevitably one of the band, T. J. Horseley Curties, Francis Lathom, William Herbert, Edward Montague, Mrs. Roche, Eliza Parsons, Miss M. Hamilton, Mrs. Helme, Mrs. Meeke, Isabella Kelley, and many another beside insatiably agog for horrid phantasmagoria would have utilized the Vampire in some funereal episode.
One might even have supposed that the notes to Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer,[28] must have put them on the track, and surely stanzas eight, nine and ten in Book VIII could not have passed unnoticed:
A night of darkness and of storms!
Into the Chamber of the Tomb
Thalaba led the Old Man,
To roof him from the rain.
A night of storms! the wind
Swept through the moonless sky,
And moan’d among the pillar’d sepulchres;
