But Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the occasion.

_The Castle of Otranto_ "lay in" Horace's "way, and he found it." And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.
In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the success was even more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though not quite so slow.

In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's _Old English Baron_ (1777), and as in another celebrated case "thought it a bore." It _is_ rather a bore.

It has more consecutiveness than _Otranto_, and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsily used supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose.

But there is not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes curiously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where he got it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son.