Much of the archaic diction and antique spelling, as well as the ruder grotesquerie, that in the first edition proclaimed its relation to the pseudo-balladry of the time disappeared in the later editions.

But this crude grotesquerie of horrorquite in the taste of that day, the day of "Monk" Lewis and Mrs. RadcliffeColeridge's finer poetical judgment soon rejected.

When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures.

His picture of the Southern non-slaveholders, which, be it observed, he applied in his first edition to five millions or ten-elevenths of that whole white population, and which he restricted, under stress of contemporary criticism, only to four million souls in the second edition, is merely the most extreme of his grotesqueries.