Whether referring to poetry, plays, architecture or decorations, the very loose term "Gothic," as understood by 18th century fashionable and affluent collectors and artificers of antiquities, described anything very old and neither Classical nor neo-Classical. Such afficionados of medeival and Catholic relics and reproductions were inspired by the strong feeling that such moody, gloomy, archaic items evoked. The relative shortage of genuine or authentic antiquities caused a flurry of literary and architectural forgeries in the 18th century.

The past could be faked by idealized representations. Faking the past, however, was and continues to be a very real phenomenon of Western culture -- witness the proliferation of theme parks. The Romantic demand for a strong feeling, Walter Kendrick suggests, links "the rage for an artifical past" to the contemporary appeal for being shocked into a sensual response. Recall Edgar Poe's "weak and weary" narrator of "The Raven" who fashionably ponders "Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" to drown his sorrow of a lost love in the even moodier set pieces of a by-gone age. In a thoroughly secularized culture, loss of a way of life is the loss of life itself.