man--in his German ballad period--they affected his imagination with a
"pleasing horror." But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet
than as a student of _Cultur geschichte_.

A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs--a rational smile at
their absurdity--such is the tone of his "Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft" (1830), a passage or two from which will give his attitude
very precisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not so
very different from Addison's, allowing for the distance in time and
place, and for Scott's livelier imagination.[49] Scott had his laugh at
Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's
"Fatal Revenge" [50] he insists upon the delicacy with which the
supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His own management
of such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole's or Mrs.
Radcliffe's, has not the subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady of
Avenel, _e.g._, in "The Abbot," is a notorious failure. There was too
much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home. "The
shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses"; the "night side of things";
the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. Walter
Pater[51] says that Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the true
romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On
the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the
mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch
superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a
satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Märchen" are the
shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modern
imagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic. Scott's dealing
with subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He does
not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popular
superstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as he