The notion of persistence is interesting; for something to persist, there must be factors or forces against its continuation, or reasons why it should not continue, in spite of which, or perhaps because of which, it persists. One of the obvious forces against which the old gothic romance (1764–1820) needed to persist was the benignly censorious embrace of Sir Walter Scott, who took an ominously close interest in it — though he preferred the term “supernatural fiction.” In his reviews of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charles Maturin, and finally, in 1827, E. T. A. Hoffmann, he made the point repeatedly that the contemporary author of such romances made a contract with the contemporary reader in an enlightened age, to whom an excess of sensational effects and the requirement of an assent to the irrational superstitions of an earlier age were neither effective, nor appropriate, nor pleasing. His favorite metaphor for the relation between reader and text was financial: having opened an account with the reader, Scott argued in a number of places, including the 1827 essay on Hoffmann, the author should not overdraw it. Aesthetic bankruptcy would follow as the night the day, because the enlightened reader of the post-heroic, post-Napoleonic nineteenth century would refuse any further unsecured loans. Here is the variation of this admonition in the 1827 Hoffmann essay: