Caleb Williams, a raw country youth, becomes secretary to Falkland, a benevolent country gentleman, who has come to settle in England after spending some years in Italy. Collins, the steward, tells Williams his patron's history. Falkland has always been renowned for the nobility of his character. In Italy, where he inspired the love and devotion of an Italian lady, he avoided, by "magnanimity," a duel with her lover. On Falkland's return to England, Tyrrel, a brutal squire who was jealous of his popularity, conceived a violent hatred against him. When Miss Melville, Tyrrel's ill-used ward, fell in love with Falkland, who had rescued her from a fire, her guardian sought to marry her to a boorish, brutal farm-labourer. Though Falkland's timely intervention saved her in this crisis, the girl eventually died as the result of Tyrrel's cruelty. As she was the victim of tyranny, Falkland felt it his duty at a public assembly to denounce Tyrrel as her murderer. The squire retaliated by making a personal assault on his antagonist. As Falkland "had perceived the nullity of all expostulation with Mr. Tyrrel," and as duelling according to the Godwinian principles was "the vilest of all egotism," he was deprived of the natural satisfaction of meeting his assailant in physical or even mental combat. Yet "he was too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry ever to forget the situation"—as Godwin seems to think a "man of reason" might have done in these circumstances. Tyrrel was stabbed in the dark, and Falkland, on whom suspicion naturally fell, was tried, but eventually acquitted without a stain on his character. Two men—a father and son called Hawkins—whom Falkland had befriended against the overbearing Tyrrel, were condemned and executed for the crime. This is the state of affairs when Caleb Williams enters Falkland's service and takes up the thread of the narrative. On hearing the story of the murder, Williams, who has been perplexed by the gloomy moods of his master, allows his suspicions to rest on Falkland, and to gratify his overmastering passion of curiosity determines to spy incessantly until he has solved the problem. One day, after having heard a groan of anguish, Williams peers through the half-open door of a closet, and catches sight of Falkland in the act of opening the lid of a chest. This incident fans his smouldering curiosity into flame, and he is soon after detected by his master in an attempt to break open the chest in the "Bluebeard's chamber." Not without cause, Falkland is furiously angry, but for some inexplicable reason confesses to the murder, at the same time expressing his passionate determination at all costs to preserve his reputation. He is tortured, not by remorse for his crime, but by the fear of being found out, and seeks to terrorise Williams into silence by declaring:

"To gratify a foolishly inquisitive humour you have sold yourself. You shall continue in my service, but can never share my affection. If ever an unguarded word escape from your lips, if ever you excite my jealousy or suspicion, expect to pay for it by your death or worse."

From this moment Williams is helpless. Turn where he will, the toils of Falkland encompass him. Forester, Falkland's half-brother, tries to persuade Williams to enter his service. Williams endeavours to flee from his master, who prevents his escape by accusing him, in the presence of Forester, of stealing some jewellery and bank-notes which have disappeared in the confusion arising from an alarm of fire. The plunder has been placed in Williams' boxes, and the evidence against him is overwhelming. He is imprisoned, and the sordid horror of his life in the cells gives Godwin an opportunity of showing "how man becomes the destroyer of man." He escapes, and is sheltered by a gang of thieves, whose leader, Raymond, a Godwinian theorist, listens with eager sympathy to his tale, which he regards as "only one fresh instance of the tyranny and perfidiousness exercised by the powerful members of the community against those who are less privileged than themselves." When a reward is offered for the capture of Williams, the thieves are persuaded that they must not deliver the lamb to the wolf. After an old hag, whose animosity he has aroused, has made a bloodthirsty attack on him with a hatchet, Williams feels obliged to leave their habitation "abruptly without leave-taking." He then assumes beggar's attire and an Irish brogue, but is soon compelled to seek a fresh disguise. In Wales as in London, he comes across someone who has known Falkland, and is reviled for his treachery to so noble a master, and cast forth with ignominy. He discovers that Falkland has hired an unscrupulous villain, Gines, to follow him from place to place, blackening his reputation. Finally desperation drives him to accuse Falkland openly, though, after doing so, he praises the murderer, and loathes himself for his betrayal:

"Mr. Falkland is of a noble nature ... a man worthy of affection and kindness ... I am myself the basest and most odious of mankind."

The inexorable persecutor in return cries at last:

"Williams, you have conquered! I see too late the greatness and elevation of your mind. I confess that it is to my fault and not yours that I owe my ruin ... I am the most execrable of all villains... As reputation was the blood that warmed my heart, so I feel that death and infamy must seize me together."

Three days later Falkland dies, but instead of experiencing relief at the death of his persecutor, Williams becomes the victim of remorse, regarding himself as the murderer of a noble spirit, who had been inevitably ruined by the corruption of human society:

"Thou imbibedst the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth, and the base and low-minded envy that met thee on thy return to thy native seats, operated with this poison to hurry thee into madness."

At the conclusion of the story, Godwin has not succeeded in making his moral very clear. The "wicked aristocrat" who figures in the preface as "carrying into private life the execrable principles of kings and ministers" emerges at last almost as a saintly figure, who through a false notion of honour has unfortunately become the victim of a brutal squire. But, if the story does not "rouse men to a sense of the evils of slavery," or "constitute an epoch in the mind of every reader," it has compensating merits and may be read with unfailing interest either as a study of morbid psychology or as a spirited detective story. Godwin's originality in his dissection of human motive has hardly yet been sufficiently emphasised, perhaps because he is so scrupulous in acknowledging literary debts.[78] From Mrs. Radcliffe, whose Romance of the Forest was published the year before Caleb Williams, he borrowed the mysterious chest, the nature of whose contents is hinted at but never actually disclosed; but Godwin was no wizard, and had neither the gift nor the inclination to conjure with Gothic properties. In leaving imperfectly explained the incident of the discovery of the heart in The Monastery, Scott shielded himself behind Godwin's Iron Chest, which gave its name to Colman's drama.[79] Godwin's peculiar interest was in criminal psychology, and he concentrates on the dramatic conflict between the murderer and the detective. An unusual turn is given to the story by the fact that the criminal is the pursuer instead of the pursued. Godwin intended later in life to write a romance based on the story of Eugene Aram, the philosophical murderer; and his careful notes on the scheme are said to have been utilised by his friend, Bulwer Lytton, in his novel of that name.[80] Caleb Williams helped to popularise the criminal in fiction, and Paul Clifford, the story of the chivalrous highwayman, is one of its literary descendants.

Godwin was a pioneer breaking new ground in fiction; and, as he was a man of talent rather than of genius, it is idle to expect perfection of workmanship. The story is full of improbabilities, but they are described in so matter-of-fact a style that we "soberly acquiesce." After an hour of Godwin's grave society an effervescent sense of humour subsides. A mind open to suggestion is soon infected by his imperturbable seriousness, which effectually stills "obstinate questionings." Even the brigands who live with their philanthropic leader are accepted without demur. After all, Raymond is only Robin Hood turned political philosopher. The ingenious resources of Caleb Williams when he strives to elude his pursuer are part of the legitimate stock-in-trade of the hero of a novel of adventure. He is not as other men are, and comes through perilous escapades with miraculous success. It is at first difficult to see why Falkland does not realise that his plan of ceaselessly harassing his victim is likely to force Williams to accuse him publicly, but gradually we begin to regard his mental obliquity as one of the decrees of fate. Falkland's obtuseness is of the same nature as that of the sleeper who undertakes a voyage to Australia to deliver a letter which anywhere but in a dream would have been dropped in the nearest pillar-box. The obvious solution that would occur to a waking mind is persistently evasive. The plot of Caleb Williams hinges on an improbability, but so does that of King Lear; and if it had not been for Falkland's stupidity, the story would have ended with the first volume. Godwin excels in the analysis of mental conditions, but fails when he attempts to transmute passionate feeling into words. We are conscious that he is a cold-blooded spectator ab extra striving to describe what he has never felt for himself. It is not even "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Men of this world, who are carried away by scorn and anger, utter their feelings simply and directly. Godwin's characters pause to cull their words from dictionaries. Forester's invective, when he believes that Williams has basely robbed his master is astonishingly elegant: "Vile calumniator! You are the abhorrence of nature, the opprobrium of the human species and the earth can only be freed from an insupportable burthen by your being exterminated."[81] The diction is so elaborately dignified that the contempt which was meant almost to annihilate Caleb Williams, lies effectually concealed behind a blinding veil of rhetoric. When he has leisure to adorn, he translates the simplest, most obvious reflections into the "jargon" of political philosophy, but, driven impetuously forward by the excitement of his theme, he throws off jerky, spasmodic sentences containing but a single clause. His style is a curious mixture of these two manners.

The aim of St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, is to show that "boundless wealth, freedom from disease, weakness and death are as nothing in the scale against domestic affection and the charities of private life."[82] For four years Godwin had desired to modify what he had said on the subject of private affections in Political Justice, while he asserted his conviction of the general truth of his system. Godwin had argued that private affections resulted in partiality, and therefore injustice.[83] If a house were on fire, reason would urge a man to save Fenelon in preference to his valet; but if the rescuer chanced to be the brother or father of the valet, private feeling would intervene, unreasonably urging him to save his relative and abandon Fenelon. Lest he should be regarded as a wrecker of homes, Godwin wished to show that domestic happiness should not be despised by the man of reason. Instead of expressing his views on this subject in a succinct pamphlet, Godwin, elated by the success of Caleb Williams, decided to embody them in the form of a novel. He at first despaired of finding a theme so rich in interest as that of his first novel, but ultimately decided that "by mixing human feelings and passions with incredible situations he might conciliate the patience even of the severest judges."[84] The phrase, "mixing human feelings," betrays in a flash Godwin's mechanical method of constructing a story. He makes no pretence that St. Leon grew naturally as a work of art. He imposed upon himself an unsuitable task, and, though he doggedly accomplished it, the result is dull and laboured.

The plot of St. Leon was suggested by Dr. John Campbell's Hermippus Redivivus,[85] and centres round the theories of the Rosicrucians. The first volume describes the early life of the knight St. Leon, his soldiering, his dissipations, and his happy marriage to Marguerite, whose character is said to have been modelled on that of Mary Wollstonecraft. In Paris he is tempted into extravagance and into playing for high stakes, with the result that he retires to Switzerland the "prey of poverty and remorse." Misfortunes pursue him for some time, but he at last enjoys six peaceful years, at the end of which he is visited by a mysterious old man, whom he conceals in a summer-house, and whom he refuses to betray to the Inquisitors in search of him. In return the old man reveals to him the secret of the elixir vitae, and of the philosopher's stone. Marguerite becomes suspicious of the source of her husband's wealth: "For a soldier you present me with a projector and a chemist, a cold-blooded mortal raking in the ashes of a crucible for a selfish and solitary advantage." His son, Charles, unable to endure the aspersions cast upon his father's honour during their travels together in Germany, deserts him. St. Leon is imprisoned because he cannot account for the death of the stranger and for his own sudden acquisition of wealth, but contrives his escape by bribing the jailor. He travels to Italy, but is unable to escape from misfortune. Suspected of black magic, he becomes an object of hatred to the inhabitants of the town where he lives. His house is burnt down, his servant and his favourite dog are killed, and he soon hears of the death of his unhappy wife. He is imprisoned in the dungeons of the Inquisition, but escapes, and takes refuge with a Jew, whom he compels to shelter him, until another dose of the elixir restores his youthful appearance, and he sets forth again, this time disguised as a wealthy Spanish cavalier. He visits his own daughters, representing himself as the executor under their father's will. He decides to devote himself to the service of others, and is revered as the saviour of Hungary, until disaffection, caused by a shortage of food, renders him unpopular. He makes a friend of Bethlem Gabor, whose wife and children have been savagely murdered by a band of marauders. St. Leon, we are told, "found an inexhaustible and indescribable pleasure in examining the sublime desolation of a mighty soul." But Gabor soon conceives a bitter hatred against him, and entraps him in a subterranean vault, where he languishes for many months, refusing to yield up his secret. At length the castle is besieged, and Gabor before his death gives St. Leon his liberty. The leader of the expedition proves to be St. Leon's long-lost son, Charles, who has assumed the name of De Damville. St. Leon, without at first revealing his identity, cultivates the friendship of his son, but Charles, on learning of his dealings with the supernatural, repudiates his father. Finally the marriage of his son to Pandora proves to St. Leon that despite his misfortunes "there is something in this world worth living for."

The Inquisition scenes of St. Leon were undoubtedly coloured faintly by those of Lewis's Monk (1794) and Mrs. Radcliffe's Italian (1798); but it is characteristic of Godwin that instead of trying to portray the terror of the shadowy hall, he chooses rather to present the argumentative speeches of St. Leon and the Inquisitor. The aged stranger, who bestows on St. Leon the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, has the piercing eye so familiar to readers of the novel of terror: "You wished to escape from its penetrating power, but you had not the strength to move. I began to feel as if it were some mysterious and superior being in human form;"[86] but apart from this trait he is not an impressive figure. The only character who would have felt perfectly at home in the realm of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis is Bethlem Gabor, who appears for the first time in the fourth volume of St. Leon. He is akin to Schedoni and his compeers in his love of solitude, his independence of companionship, and his superhuman aspect, but he is a figure who inspires awe and pity as well as terror. Beside this personage the other characters pale into insignificance:

"He was more than six feet in stature ... and he was built as if it had been a colossus, destined to sustain the weight of the starry heavens. His voice was like thunder ... his head and chin were clothed with a thick and shaggy hair, in colour a dead-black. He had suffered considerable mutilation in the services through which he had passed ... Bethlem Gabor, though universally respected for the honour and magnanimity of a soldier, was not less remarkable for habits of reserve and taciturnity... Seldom did he allow himself to open his thoughts but when he did, Great God! what supernatural eloquence seemed to inspire and enshroud him... Bethlem Gabor's was a soul that soared to a sightless distance above the sphere of pity."[87]

The superstitions of bygone ages, which had fired the imagination of so many writers of romance, left Godwin cold. He was mildly interested in the supernatural as affording insight into the "credulity of the human mind," and even compiled a treatise on The Lives of the Necromancers (1834).[88] But the hints and suggestions, the gloom, the weird lights and shades which help to create that romantic atmosphere amid which the alchemist's dream seems possible of realisation are entirely lacking in Godwin's story. He displays everything in a high light. The transference of the gifts takes place not in the darkness of a subterranean vault, but in the calm light of a summer evening. No unearthly groans, no phosphorescent lights enhance the horror and mystery of the scene. Godwin is coolly indifferent to historical accuracy, and fails to transport us back far beyond the end of the eighteenth century. Rousseau's theories were apparently disseminated widely in 1525. St. Leon is remembered now rather for its position in the history of the novel than for any intrinsic charm. Godwin was the first to embody in a romance the ideas of the Rosicrucians which inspired Bulwer Lytton's Zicci, Zanoni and A Strange Story.

St. Leon was travestied, the year after it appeared, in a work called St. Godwin: A Tale of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by "Count Reginald de St. Leon," which gives a scathing survey of the plot, with all its improbabilities exposed. The bombastic style of St. Leon is imitated and only slightly exaggerated, and the author finally satirises Godwin bitterly:

"Thinking from my political writings that I was a good hand at fiction, I turned my thoughts to novel-writing. These I wrote in the same pompous, inflated style as I had used in my other publications, hoping that my fine high-sounding periods would assist to make the unsuspecting reader swallow all the insidious reasoning, absurdity and nonsense I could invent."[89]

The parodist takes Godwin almost as seriously as he took himself, and his attack is needlessly savage. Godwin's political opinions may account for the brutality of his assailant who doubtless belonged to the other camp. When Godwin attempts the supernatural in his other novels, he always fails to create an atmosphere of mystery. The apparition in Cloudesley appears, fades, and reappears in a manner so undignified as to remind us of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland:

"I suddenly saw my brother's face looking out from among the trees as I passed. I saw the features as distinctly as if the meridian sun had beamed upon them... It was by degrees that the features showed themselves thus out of what had been a formless shadow. I gazed upon it intently. Presently it faded away by as insensible degrees as those by which it had become agonisingly clear. After a short time it returned."

Godwin describes a ghost as deliberately and exactly as he would describe a house, and his delineation causes not the faintest tremor. Having little imagination himself, he leaves nothing to the imagination of the reader. In his Lives of the Necromancers, he shows that he is interested in discovering the origin of a belief in natural magic; but the life stories of the magicians suggest no romantic pictures to his imagination. In dealing with the mysterious and the uncanny, Godwin was attempting something alien to his mind and temper.

In Godwin's St. Leon the elixir of life is quietly bestowed on the hero in a summer-house in his own garden. The poet, Thomas Moore, in his romance, The Epicurean (1827), sends forth a Greek adventurer to seek it in the secret depths of the catacombs beneath the pyramids of Egypt. He originally intended to tell his story in verse, but after writing a fragment, Alciphron, abandoned this design and decided to begin again in prose. His story purports to be a translation of a recently discovered manuscript buried in the time of Diocletian. Inspired by a dream, in which an ancient and venerable man bids him seek the Nile if he wishes to discover the secret of eternal life, Alciphron, a young Epicurean philosopher of the second century, journeys to Egypt. At Memphis he falls in love with a beautiful priestess, Alethe, whom he follows into the catacombs. Bearing a glimmering lamp, he passes through a gallery, where the eyes of a row of corpses, buried upright, glare upon him, into a chasm peopled by pale, phantom-like forms. He braves the terrors of a blazing grove and of a dark stream haunted by shrieking spectres, and finds himself whirled round in chaos like a stone shot in a sling. Having at length passed safely through the initiation of Fire, Water and Air, he is welcomed into a valley of "unearthly sadness," with a bleak, dreary lake lit by a "ghostly glimmer of sunshine." He gazes with awe on the image of the god Osiris, who presides over the silent kingdom of the dead. Watching within the temple of Isis, he suddenly sees before him the priestess, Alethe, who guides him back to the realms of day. At the close of the story, after Alethe has been martyred for the Christian faith, Alciphron himself becomes a Christian.

In The Epicurean, Moore shows a remarkable power of describing scenes of gloomy terror, which he throws into relief by occasional glimpses of light and splendour. The journey of Alciphron inevitably challenges comparison with that of Vathek, but the spirit of mockery that animates Beckford's story is wholly absent. Moore paints a theatrical panorama of effective scenes, but his figures are mere shadows.

The miseries of an existence, prolonged far beyond the allotted span, are depicted not only in stories of the elixir of life, but in the legends centring round the Wandering Jew. Croly's Salathiel (1829), like Eugene Sue's lengthy romance, Le Juif Errant, won fame in its own day, but is now forgotten. Some of Croly's descriptions, such as that of the burning trireme, have a certain dazzling magnificence, but the colouring is often crude and startling. The figure of the deathless Jew is apt to be lost amid the mazes of the author's rhetoric. The conception of a man doomed to wander eternally in expiation of a curse is in itself an arresting theme likely to attract a romantic writer, but the record of his adventures may easily become monotonous.

The "novel of terror" has found few more ardent admirers than the youthful Shelley, who saw in it a way of escape from the harsh realities and dull routine of ordinary existence. From his childhood the world of ideas seems to have been at least as real and familiar to him as the material world. The fabulous beings of whom he talked to his young sisters—the Great Tortoise in Warnham Pond, the snake three hundred years old in the garden at Field Place, the grey-bearded alchemist in his garret[90]—had probably for him as much meaning and interest as the living people around him. Urged by a restless desire to evade the natural and encounter the supernatural, he wandered by night under the "perilous moonshine," haunted graveyards in the hope of "high talk with the departed dead," dabbled in chemical experiments and pored over ancient books of magic. It was to be expected that an imagination reaching out so eagerly towards the unknown should find refuge from the uncongenial life of Sion House School in the soul-stirring region of romance. Transported by sixpenny "blue books" and the many volumed novels in the Brentford circulating library, Shelley's imagination fled joyously to that land of unlikelihood, where the earth yawns with bandits' caverns inhabited by desperadoes with bloody daggers, where the air continually resounds with the shrieks and groans of melancholy spectres, and where the pale moon ever gleams on dark and dreadful deeds. He had reached that stage of human development when fairies, elves, witches and dragons begin to lose their charm, when the gentle quiver of fear excited by an ogre, who is inevitably doomed to be slain at the last, no longer suffices. At the approach of adolescence with its surging emotions and quickening intellectual life, there awakens a demand for more thrilling incidents, for wilder passions and more desperate crimes, and it is at this period that the "novel of terror" is likely to make its strongest appeal. Youth, with its inexperience, is seldom tempted to bring fiction to the test of reality, or to scorn it on the ground of its improbability, and we may be sure that Shelley and his cousin, Medwin, as they hung spellbound over such treasures as The Midnight Groan, The Mysterious Freebooter, or Subterranean Horrors did not pause to consider whether the characters and adventures were true to life. They desired, indeed, not to criticise but to create, and in the winter of 1809-1810 united to produce a terrific romance, with the title Nightmare, in which a gigantic and hideous witch played a prominent part. After reading Schubert's Der Ewige Jude, they began a narrative poem dealing with the legend of the Wandering Jew,[91] who lingered in Shelley's imagination in after years, and whom he introduced into Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and Hellas. The grim and ghastly legends included in "Monk" Lewis's Tales of Terror (1799) and Tales of Wonder (1801) fascinated Shelley;[92] and the suggestive titles Revenge;[93] Ghasta, or the Avenging Demon;[94] St. Edmund's Eve;[95] The Triumph of Conscience from the Poems by Victor and Cazire (1810), and The Spectral Horseman from The Posthumous Poems of Margaret Nicholson (1810), all prove his preoccupation with the supernatural. That Shelley's enthusiasm for the gruesome and uncanny was not merely morbid and hysterical, the mad, schoolboyish letter, written while he was in the throes of composing St. Irvyne, is sufficient indication. In a mood of grotesque fantasy and wild exhilaration, Shelley invites his friend Graham to Field Place. The postscript is in his handwriting, but is signed by his sister Elizabeth:

"The avenue is composed of vegetable substances moulded in the form of trees called by the multitude Elm trees. Stalk along the road towards them and mind and keep yourself concealed as my mother brings a blood-stained stiletto which she purposes to make you bathe in the lifeblood of your enemy. Never mind the Death-demons and skeletons dripping with the putrefaction of the grave, that occasionally may blast your straining eyeballs. Persevere even though Hell and destruction should yawn beneath your feet.

"Think of all this at the frightful hour of midnight, when the Hell-demon leans over your sleeping form, and inspires those thoughts which eventually will lead you to the gates of destruction... The fiend of the Sussex solitudes shrieked in the wilderness at midnight—he thirsts for thy detestable gore, impious Fergus. But the day of retribution will arrive. H + D=Hell Devil."[96]

That Shelley could jest thus lightly in the mock-terrific vein shows that his mind was fundamentally sane and well-balanced, and that he only regarded "fiendmongering" as a pleasantly thrilling diversion. His Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) were probably written with the same zest and spirit as his harrowing letter to "impious Fergus." They are the outcome of a boyish ambition to practise the art of freezing the blood, and their composition was a source of pride and delight to their author. A letter to Peacock (Nov. 9, 1818) from Italy re-echoes the note of child-like enjoyment in weaving romances:

"We went to see heaven knows how many more palaces—Ranuzzi, Marriscalchi, Aldobrandi. If you want Italian names for any purpose, here they are; I should be glad of them if I was writing a novel."

Zastrozzi was published in April, 1810, while Shelley was still at Eton, and with the L40 paid for the romance, he is said to have given a banquet to eight of his friends. Though the story is little more than a rechauffe of previous tales of terror, it evidently attained some measure of popularity. It was reprinted in The Romancist and Novelist's Library in 1839. Like Godwin, Shelley contrived to smuggle a little contraband theory into his novels, but his stock-in-trade is mainly that of the terrormongers. The book to which Shelley was chiefly indebted was Zofloya or the Moor (1806), by the notorious Charlotte Dacre or "Rosa Matilda," but there are many reminiscences of Mrs. Radcliffe and of "Monk" Lewis. The sources of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne have been investigated in the Modern Language Review (Jan. 1912), by Mr. A. M. D. Hughes, who gives a complete analysis of the plot of Zofloya, and indicates many parallels with Shelley's novels. The heroine of Zofloya is clearly a lineal descendant of Lewis's Matilda, though Victoria di Loredani, with all her vices, never actually degenerates into a fiend. Victoria, it need hardly be stated, is nobly born, but she has been brought up amid frivolous society by a worthless mother, and: "The wildest passions predominated in her bosom; to gratify them she possessed an unshrinking, relentless soul that would not startle at the darkest crime."

Zofloya, who spurs her on, is the Devil himself. The plot is highly melodramatic, and contains a headlong flight, an earthquake and several violent deaths. In Zastrozzi, Shelley draws upon the characters and incidents of this story very freely. His lack of originality is so obvious as to need no comment. The very names he chooses are borrowed. Julia is the name of the pensive heroine in Mrs. Radcliffe's Sicilian Romance. Matilda carries with it ugly memories of the lady in Lewis's Monk; Verezzi occurs in The Mysteries of Udolpho; Zastrozzi is formed by prefixing an extra syllable to the name Strozzi from Zofloya. The incidents are those which happen every day in the realm of terror. The villain, the hero, the melancholy heroine, and her artful rival, develop no new traits, but act strictly in accordance with tradition. They never infringe the rigid code of manners and morals laid down for them by previous generations. The scenery is invariably appropriate as a setting to the incidents, and even the weather may be relied on to act in a thoroughly conventional manner. The characters are remarkable for their violent emotions and their marvellously expressive eyes. When Verezzi's senses are "chilled with the frigorific torpidity of despair," his eyes "roll horribly in their sockets." When "direst revenge swallows up every other feeling" in the soul of Matilda, her eyes "scintillate with a fiend-like expression." Incidents follow one another with a wild and stupefying rapidity. Every moment is a crisis. The style is startlingly abrupt, and the short, disconnected paragraphs are fired off like so many pistol shots. The sequence of events is mystifying—Zastrozzi's motive for persecuting Verezzi is darkly concealed until the end of the story, for reasons known only to writers of the novel of terror. Shelley's romance, in short, is no better and perhaps even worse than that of the other disciples of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis.

St. Irvyne: or the Rosicrucian (1811), though it was written by a "Gentleman of the University of Oxford" and not by a schoolboy, shows slight advance on Zastrozzi either in matter or manner. The plot indeed is more bewildering and baffling than that of Zastrozzi. The action of the story is double and alternate, the scene shifts from place to place, and the characters appear and disappear in an unaccountable and disconcerting fashion. This time Godwin's St. Leon has to be added to the list of Shelley's sources. Ginotti, whose name is stolen from a brigand in Zofloya, is not the devil but one of his sworn henchmen, who has discovered and tasted the elixir vitae. Like Zofloya, he is surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery. So that he may himself die, Ginotti, like the old stranger in St. Leon, is anxious to impart his secret to another. He chooses as his victim, Wolfstein, a young noble who, like Leonardo in Zofloya, has allied himself with a band of brigands. The bandit, Ginotti, aids Wolfstein to escape with a beautiful captive maiden, for whom Shelley adopts the name Megalena from Zofloya. While the lovers are in Genoa, Megalena, discovering Wolfstein with a lady named Olympia, whose "character has been ruined by a false system of education," makes him promise to murder her rival. In Olympia's bedchamber Wolfstein's hand is stayed for a moment by the sight of her beauty—a picture which recalls the powerful scene in Mrs. Radcliffe's Italian, when Schedoni bends over the sleeping Ellena. After Olympia's suicide, Megalena and Wolfstein flee together from Genoa. In the tale of terror, as in the modern film-play, a flight of some kind is almost indispensable. Ginotti, whose habit of disappearing and reappearing reminds us of the ghostly monk in the ruins of Paluzzi, tells his history to Wolfstein, and, at the destined hour, bestows the prescription for the elixir, and appoints a meeting in St. Irvyne's abbey, where Wolfstein stumbles over the corpse of Megalena. Wolfstein refuses to deny God. Both Ginotti and his victim are blasted by lightning, amid which the "frightful prince of terror, borne on the pinions of hell's sulphurous whirlwind," stands before them.

"On a sudden Ginotti's frame, mouldered to a gigantic skeleton, yet two pale and ghastly flames glared in his eyeless sockets. Blackened in terrible convulsions, Wolfstein expired; over him had the power of hell no influence. Yes, endless existence is thine, Ginotti—a dateless and hopeless eternity of horror."

Interspersed with this somewhat inconsequent story are the adventures of Eloise, who is first introduced on her return home, disconsolate, to a ruined abbey. We are given to understand that the story is to unfold the misfortunes which have led to her downfall, but she is happily married ere the close. She accompanies her dying mother on a journey, as Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho accompanied her father, and meets a mysterious stranger, Nempere, at a lonely house, where they take refuge. Nempere proves to be a less estimable character than Valancourt, who fell to Emily's lot in similar circumstances. He sells her to an English noble, Mountfort, at whose house she meets Fitzeustace, who, like Vivaldi in The Italian, overhears her confession of love for himself. Nempere is killed in a duel by Mountfort. At the close, Shelley states abruptly that Nempere is Ginotti, and Eloise is Wolfstein's sister. In springing a secret upon us suddenly on the last page, Shelley was probably emulating Lewis's Bravo of Venice; but the conclusion, which is intended to forge a connecting link between the tales, is unsatisfying. It is not surprising that the publisher, Stockdale, demanded some further elucidation of the mystery. Ginotti, apparently, dies twice, and Shelley's letters fail to solve the problem. He wrote to Stockdale: "Ginotti, as you will see, did not die by Wolfstein's hand, but by the influence of that natural magic, which, when the secret was imparted to the latter, destroyed him."[97] A few days later he wrote again, evidently in reply to further questions: "On a re-examination you will perceive that Mountfort physically did kill Ginotti, which must appear from the latter's paleness." The truth seems to be that Shelley was weary of his puppets, and had no desire to extricate them from the tangle in which they were involved, though he was impatient to see St. Irvyne in print, and spoke hopefully of its "selling mechanically to the circulating libraries."

Shelley took advantage of the privilege of writers of romance to palm off on the public some of his earliest efforts at versification. These poems, distributed impartially among the various characters, are introduced with the same laborious artlessness as the songs in a musical comedy. Megalena, though suffering from excruciating mental agony, finds leisure to scratch several verses on the walls of her cell. It would indeed be a poor-spirited heroine who could not deftly turn a sonnet to night or to the moon, however profound her woes. Superhuman strength and courage is an endowment necessary to all who would dwell in the realms of terror and survive the fierce struggle for existence. Peacock, in Nightmare Abbey, paints the Shelley of 1812 in Scythrop, who devours tragedies and German romances, and is troubled with a "passion for reforming the world." "He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves... He had a certain portion of mechanical genius which his romantic projects tended to develop. He constructed models of cells and recesses, sliding panels and secret passages, that would have baffled the skill of the Parisian police." His bearing was that of a romantic villain: "He stalked about like the grand Inquisitor, and the servants flitted past him like familiars."

Although Shelley outgrew his youthful taste for horrors, his early reading left traces on the imagery and diction of his poetry. There is an unusual profusion in his vocabulary of such words as ghosts, shades, charnel, tomb, torture, agony, etc., and supernatural similes occur readily to his mind. In Alastor he compares himself to

"an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope,"

and cries:

"O that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law Of this so lonely world."

In the Ode to the West Wind his memories of an older and finer kind of romance suggested the fantastic comparison of the dead leaves to

"ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,"

and in Prometheus Unbound Panthea sees

"unimaginable shapes Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deeps."

The poem Ginevra, which describes an enforced wedding and the death of the bride at the sight of her real lover, may well have been inspired by reading the romances of terror, where such events are an everyday occurrence. The gruesome descriptions in The Revolt of Islam, the decay of the garden in The Sensitive Plant, the tortures of Prometheus, all show how Shelley strove to work on the instinctive emotion of fear. In The Cenci he touches the profoundest depths of human passion, and shows his power of finding words, terrible in their simple grandeur, for a soul in agony. In the tragedies of Shakespeare and of his followers—Ford, Webster and Tourneur—Shelley had heard the true language of anguish and despair. The futile, frenzied shrieking of Matilda and her kind is forgotten in the passionate nobility or fearful calm of the speeches of Beatrice Cenci.



CHAPTER VII - SATIRES ON THE NOVEL OF TERROR.

A conflict between "sense and sensibility" was naturally to be expected; and, the year after Mrs. Radcliffe published The Italian, Jane Austen had completed her Northanger Abbey, ridiculing the "horrid" school of fiction. It is noteworthy that for the Mysteries of Udolpho Mrs. Radcliffe received L500, and for The Italian L800; while for the manuscript of Northanger Abbey, the bookseller paid Jane Austen the ungenerous sum of L10, selling it again later to Henry Austen for the same amount. The contrast in market value is significant. The publisher, who, it may be added, was not necessarily a literary critic, probably realised that if the mock romance were successful, its tendency would be to endanger the popularity of the prevailing mode in fiction. Hence for many years it was concealed as effectively as if it had lain in the haunted apartment of one of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic abbeys. Among Jane Austen's early unpublished writings were "burlesques ridiculing the improbable events and exaggerated sentiments which she had met with in sundry silly romances"; but her spirited defence of the novelist's art in Northanger Abbey is clear evidence that her raillery is directed not against fiction in general, but rather against such "horrid" stories as those included in the list supplied to Isabella Thorpe by "a Miss Andrews, one of the sweetest creatures in the world."

It has sometimes been supposed that the more fantastic titles in this catalogue were figments of Jane Austen's imagination, but the identity of each of the seven stories may be established beyond question. Two of the stories—The Necromancer of the Black Forest, a translation from the German, and The Castle of Wolfenbach, by Mrs. Eliza Parsons (who was also responsible for Mysterious Warnings)—may still be read in The Romancist and Novelist's Library (1839-1841), a treasure-hoard of forgotten fiction. Clermont (1798) was published by Mrs. Regina Maria Roche, the authoress of The Children of the Abbey (1798), a story almost as famous in its day as Udolpho. The author of The Midnight Bell was one George Walker of Bath, whose record, like that of Miss Eleanor Sleath, who wrote the moving history of The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) in four volumes, may be found in Watts' Bibliotheca Britannica. Horrid Mysteries, perhaps the least credible of the titles, was a translation from the German of the Marquis von Grosse by R. Will. Jane Austen's attack has no tinge of bitterness or malice. John Thorpe, who declared all novels, except Tom Jones and The Monk, "the stupidest things in creation," admitted, when pressed by Catherine, that Mrs. Radcliffe's were "amusing enough" and "had some fun and nature in them"; and Henry Tilney, a better judge, owned frankly that he had "read all her works, and most of them with great pleasure." From this we may assume that Miss Austen herself was perhaps conscious of their charm as well as their absurdity.

Sheridan's Lydia Languish (1775) and Colman's Polly Honeycombe (1777) were both demoralised by the follies of sentimental fiction, as Biddy Tipkin, in Steele's Tender Husband (1705), had been by romances. It was Miss Austen's purpose in creating Catherine Morland to present a maiden bemused by Gothic romance:

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine." In almost every detail she is a refreshing contrast to the traditional type. Two long-lived conventions—the fragile mother, who dies at the heroine's birth, and the tyrannical father—are repudiated at the very outset; and Catherine is one of a family of seven. We cannot conceive that Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines even at the age of ten would "love nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house." Her accomplishments lack the brilliance and distinction of those of Adela and Julia, but,

"Though she could not write sonnets she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, she could listen to other people's performances with very little fatigue. Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil—she had no notion of drawing, not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover's profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell miserably short of the true heroic height...Not one started with rapturous wonder on beholding her...nor was she once called a divinity by anybody."

She had no lover at the age of seventeen,

"because there was not a lord in the neighbourhood—not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one whose origin was unknown."

Nor is Catherine aided in her career by those "improbable events," so dear to romance, that serve to introduce a hero—a robber's attack, a tempest, or a carriage accident. With a sly glance at such dangerous characters as Lady Greystock in The Children of the Abbey (1798), Miss Austen creates the inert, but good-natured Mrs. Alien as Catherine's chaperone in Bath:

"It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Alien that the reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work and how she will probably contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is capable, whether by her imprudence, vulgarity or jealousy—whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character or turning her out of doors."

Amid all the diversions of the gay and beautiful city of Bath, Miss Austen does not lose sight entirely of her satirical aim, though she turns aside for a time. Catherine's confusion of mind is suggested with exquisite art in a single sentence. As she drives with John Thorpe she "meditates by turns on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trapdoors." This prepares us for the delightful scene in which Tilney, on the way to the abbey, foretells what Catherine may expect on her arrival. The hall dimly lighted by the expiring embers of a wood fire, the deserted bedchamber "never used since some cousin or kin had died in it about twenty years before," the single lamp, the tapestry, the funereal bed, the broken lute, the ponderous chest, the secret door, the vaulted room, the rusty dagger, the cabinet of ebony and gold with its roll of manuscripts, prove his intimacy with The Romance of the Forest, as well as with The Mysteries of Udolpho. The black chest and the cabinet are there in startling fulfilment of his prophecies, and when, just as with beating heart Catherine is about to decipher the roll of paper she has discovered in the cabinet drawer, she accidentally extinguishes her candle:

"A lamp could not have expired with more awful effect... Darkness impenetrable and immovable filled the room. A violent gust of wind, rising with sudden fury, added fresh horror to the moment... Human nature could support no more ... groping her way to the bed she jumped hastily in, and sought some suspension of agony by creeping far beneath the clothes... The storm still raged... Hour after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three proclaimed by all the clocks in the house before the tempest subsided, and she, unknowingly, fell fast asleep. She was awakened the next morning at eight o'clock by the housemaid's opening her window-shutter. She flew to the mysterious manuscript, If the evidence of sight might be trusted she held a washing bill in her hands ... she felt humbled to the dust."

Even this bitter humiliation does not sweep away the cobwebs of romance from Catherine's imaginative mind, but the dark suspicions she harbours about General Tilney are not altogether inexplicable. He is so much less natural and so much more stagey than the other characters that he might reasonably be expected to dabble in the sinister. This time Catherine is misled by memories of the Sicilian Romance into weaving a mystery around the fate of Mrs. Tilney, whom she pictures receiving from the hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food. She watches in vain for "glimmering lights," like those in the palace of Mazzini, and determines to search for "a fragmented journal continued to the last gasp," like that of Adeline's father in The Romance of the Forest. In this search she encounters Tilney, who has returned unexpectedly from Woodston. He dissipates once and for all her nervous fancies, and Catherine decides: "Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not spotless as an angel, might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so."

Miss Austen's novel is something more than a mock-romance, and Catherine is not a mere negative of the traditional heroine, but a human and attractive girl, whose fortunes we follow with the deepest interest. At the close, after Catherine's ignominious journey home, we are back again in the cool world of reality. The abbey is abandoned, after it has served its purpose in disciplining the heroine, in favour of the unromantic country parsonage.

In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen had deftly turned the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe to comedy; but, even if her parody had been published in 1798, when we are assured that it was completed, her satirical treatment was too quiet and subtle, too delicately mischievous, to have disturbed seriously the popularity of the novel of terror. We can imagine the Isabella Thorpes and Lydia Bennets of the day dismissing Northanger Abbey with a yawn as "an amazing dull book," and returning with renewed zest to more stimulating and "horrid" stories. Maria Edgeworth too had aimed her shaft at the sentimental heroine in one of her Moral Tales—Angelina or L'Amie Inconnue (1801). Miss Sarah Green, in Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810) had displayed the extravagant folly of a clergyman's daughter whose head was turned by romances. Ridicule of a more blatant and boisterous kind was needed, and this was supplied by Eaton Stannard Barrett, who, in 1813—five years before Northanger Abbey appeared—published The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina. In this farcical romance it is clearly Barrett's intention to make so vigorous an onslaught that "the Selinas, Evelinas, and Malvinas who faint and blush and weep through four half-bound octavos" shall be, like Catherine Morland, "humbled to the dust." Sometimes, indeed, his farce verges on brutality. To expose the follies of Cherubina it was hardly necessary to thrust her good-humoured father into a madhouse, and this grim incident sounds an incongruous, jarring note in a rollicking high-spirited farce. The plights into which Cherubina is plunged are so needlessly cruel, that, while only intending to make her ridiculous, Barrett succeeds rather in making her pitiable. But many of her adventures are only a shade more absurd than those in the romances at which he tilts. Regina Maria Roche's Children of the Abbey (1798) would take the wind from the sails of any parodist. In protracting The Heroine almost to wearisome length, Barrett probably acted deliberately in mimicry of this and a horde of other tedious romances. Certainly the unfortunate Stuart waits no longer for the fulfilment of his hopes than Lord Mortimer, the long-suffering hero of The Children of the Abbey, who early in the first volume demands of Amanda Fitzalan, what he calls an "eclaircissement," but does not win it until the close of the fourth. Barrett does not scruple to mention the titles of the books he derides. The following catalogue will show how widely he casts his net: Mysteries of Udolpho, Romance of the Forest, Children of the Abbey, Sir Charles Grandison, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, Evelina, Camilla, Cecilia, La Nouvelle Heloise, Rasselas, The Delicate Distress, Caroline of Lichfield,[98] The Knights of the Swan,[99] The Beggar Girl, The Romance of the Highlands.[100] Besides these novels, which he actually names, Barrett alludes indirectly to several others, among them Tristram Shandy and Amelia. From this enumeration it is evident that Barrett was satirising the heroine, not merely of the "novel of terror," but of the "sentimental novel" from which she traced her descent. He organises a masquerade, mindful that it is always the scene of the heroine's "best adventure," with Fielding's Amelia and Miss Burney's Cecilia and probably other novels in view. The precipitate flight of Cherubina, "dressed in a long-skirted red coat stiff with tarnished lace, a satin petticoat, satin shoes and no stockings," and with hair streaming like a meteor, described in Letter XX, is clearly a cruel mockery of Cecilia's distressful plight in Miss Burney's novel. Even Scott is not immune from Barrett's barbed arrows, and Byron is glanced at in the bogus antique language of "Eftsoones." Barrett, indeed, jeers at the mediaeval revival in its various manifestations and even at "Romanticism" generally, not merely at the new school of fiction represented by Mrs. Radcliffe, her followers and rivals. Not content with reaching his aim, as he does again and again in The Heroine, Barrett, like many another parodist, sometimes over-reaches it, and sneers at what is not in itself ridiculous.

Nominally Cherubina is the butt of Barrett's satire, but the permanent interest of the book lies in the skilful stage-managing of her lively adventures. There is hardly an attempt at characterisation. The people are mere masqueraders, who amuse us by their costume and mannerisms, but reveal no individuality. The plot is a wild extravaganza, crammed with high-flown, mock-romantic episodes. Cherry Wilkinson, as the result of a surfeit of romances, perhaps including The Misanthropic Parent or The Guarded Secret (1807), by Miss Smith, deserts her real father—a worthy farmer—to look for more aristocratic parents. As he is not picturesque enough for a villain, she repudiates him with scorn: "Have you the gaunt ferocity of famine in your countenance? Can you darken the midnight with a scowl? Have you the quivering lip and the Schedoniac contour? In a word, are you a picturesque villain full of plot and horror and magnificent wickedness? Ah! no, sir, you are only a sleek, good-humoured, chuckle-headed, old gentleman." In the course of her search she meets with amazing adventures, which she describes in a series of letters to her governess. She changes her name to Cherubina de Willoughby, and journeys to London, where, mistaking Covent Garden Theatre for an ancient castle, she throws herself on the protection of a third-rate actor, Grundy. He readily falls in with her humour, assuming the name of Montmorenci, and a suit of tin armour and a plumed helmet for her delight. Later, Cherubina is entertained by Lady Gwyn, who, for the amusement of her guests, heartlessly indulges her propensity for the romantic, and poses as her aunt. She is introduced in a gruesome scene, which recalls the fate of Agnes in Lewis's Monk, to her supposed mother, Lady Hysterica Belamour, whose memoirs, under the title Il Castello di Grimgothico, are inserted, after the manner of Mrs. Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, who love an inset tale, into the midst of the heroine's adventures. Cherubina determines to live in an abandoned castle, and gathers a band of vassals. These include Jerry, the lively retainer, inherited from a long line of comic servants, of whom Sancho Panza is a famous example, and Higginson, a struggling poet, who in virtue of his office of minstrel, addresses the mob, beginning his harangue with the time-honoured apology: "Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking." The story ends with the return of Cherubina to real life, where she is eventually restored to her father and to Stuart. The incidents, which follow one another in rapid succession, are foolish and extravagant, but the reminiscences they awaken lend them piquancy. The trappings and furniture of a dozen Gothic castles are here accumulated in generous profusion. Mouldering manuscripts, antique beds of decayed damask, a four-horsed barouche, and fluttering tapestry rejoice the heart of Cherubina, for each item in this curious medley revives moving associations in a mind nourished on the Radcliffe school. When Cherubina visits a shop she buys a diamond cross, which at once turns our thoughts to The Sicilian Romance. In Westminster Abbey she is disappointed to find "no cowled monks with scapulars"—a phrase which flashes across our memory the sinister figure of Schedoni in The Italian. At the masquerade she plans to wear a Tuscan dress from The Mysteries of Udolpho, and, when furnishing Monkton Castle she bids Jerry, the Irish comic servant, bring "flags stained with the best old blood—feudal, if possible, an old lute, lyre or harp, black hangings, curtains, and a velvet pall." Even the banditti and condottieri, who enliven so many novels of terror, cannot be ignored, and are represented by a troop of Irish ruffians. Barrett lets nothing escape him. Rousseau's theories are irreverently travestied. The thunder rolls "in an awful and Ossianly manner"; the sun, "that well-known gilder of eastern turrets," rises in empurpled splendour; the hero utters tremendous imprecations, ejaculates superlatives or frames elaborately poised, Johnsonian periods; the heroine excels in cheap but glittering repartee, wears "spangled muslin," and has "practised tripping, gliding, flitting, and tottering, with great success." Shreds and patches torn with a ruthless, masculine hand from the flimsy tapestry of romance, fitted together in a new and amusing pattern, are exhibited for our derision. The caricature is entertaining in itself, and would probably be enjoyed by those who are unfamiliar with the romances ridiculed; but the interest of identifying the booty, which Barrett rifles unceremoniously from his victims, is a fascinating pastime.

Miss Austen, with her swift stiletto, and Barrett, with his brutal bludgeon—to use a metaphor of "terror"—had each delivered an attack; and in 1818, if we may judge by Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, there is a change of fashion in fiction. How far this change is due to the satirists it is impossible to determine. Mr. Flosky, "who has seen too many ghosts himself to believe in their external appearance," through whose lips Peacock reviles "that part of the reading public which shuns the solid food of reason," probably gives the true cause for the waning popularity of the novel of terror:

"It lived upon ghosts, goblins and skeletons till even the devil himself ... became too base, common and popular for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness."

The novel of terror has been destroyed not by its enemies but by its too ardent devotees. The horrid banquet, devoured with avidity for so many years, has become so highly seasoned that the jaded palate at last cries out for something different, and, according to Peacock, finds what it desires in "the vices and blackest passions of our nature tricked out in a masquerade dress of heroism and disappointed benevolence"—an uncomplimentary description of the Byronic hero. Yet sensational fiction has lingered on side by side with other forms of fiction all through the nineteenth century, because it supplies a human and natural craving for excitement. It may not be the dominant type, but it will always exist, and will produce its thrill by ever-varying devices. Those who scoff may be taken unawares, like the company in Nightmare Abbey. The conversation turned on the subject of ghosts, and Mr. Larynx related his delightfully compact ghost story:

"I once saw a ghost myself in my study, which is the last place any one but a ghost would look for me. I had not been in it for three months and was going to consult Tillotson, when, on opening the door, I saw a venerable figure in a flannel dressing-gown, sitting in my armchair, reading my Jeremy Taylor. It vanished in a moment, and so did I, and what it was and what it wanted, I have never been able to ascertain"

—a quieter, more inoffensive ghost than that described by Defoe in his Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions: "A grave, ancient man, with a full-bottomed wig and a rich brocaded gown, who changed into the most horrible monster that ever was seen, with eyes like two fiery daggers red-hot." Mr. Flosky and Mr. Hilary have hardly declared their disbelief in ghosts when:

"The door silently opened, and a ghastly figure, shrouded in white drapery with the semblance of a bloody turban on its head, entered and stalked slowly up the apartment. Mr. Flosky was not prepared for this apparition, and made the best of his way out at the opposite door. Mr. Hilary and Marionetta followed screaming. The honourable Mr. Listless, by two turns of his body, first rolled off the sofa and then under it. Rev. Mr. Larynx leaped up and fled with so much precipitation that he overturned the table on the foot of Mr. Glowry. Mr. Glowry roared with pain in the ears of Mr. Toobad. Mr. Toobad's alarm so bewildered his senses that missing the door he threw up one of the windows, jumped out in his panic, and plunged over head and ears in the moat. Mr. Asterias and his son, who were on the watch for their mermaid, were attracted by the splashing, threw a net over him, and dragged him to land."

In Melincourt Castle a very spacious wing was left free to the settlement of a colony of ghosts, and the Rev. Mr. Portpipe often passed the night in one of the dreaded apartments over a blazing fire, with the same invariable exorcising apparatus of a large venison pasty, a little prayer-book, and three bottles of Madeira. Yet despite this excellent mockery, Peacock in Gryll Grange devotes a chapter to tales of terror and wonder, singling out the works of Charles Brockden Brown for praise, especially his Wieland, "one of the few tales in which the final explanation of the apparently supernatural does not destroy or diminish the original effect."

The title Nightmare Abbey in a catalogue would undoubtedly have caught the eye of Isabella Thorp or her friend Miss Andrews, searching eagerly for "horrid mysteries," but they would perhaps have detected the note of mockery in the name. They would, however, have been completely deceived by the title, The Mystery of the Abbey, published in Liverpool in 1819 by T.B. Johnson, and we can imagine their consternation and disgust on the arrival of the book from the circulating library. The abbey is "haunted" by the proprietors of a distillery; and the spectre, described in horrible detail, proves to be a harmless idiot, with a red handkerchief round her neck. Apart from these gibes, there is not a hint of the supernatural in the whole book. It is a picaresque novel, written by a sportsman. The title is merely a hoax.

Belinda Waters, the heroine of one of Crabbe's tales, who was "by nature negatively good," is a portrait after Miss Austen's own heart. Languidly reclining on her sofa with "half a shelf of circulating books" on a table at her elbow, Belinda tosses wearily aside a half-read volume of Clarissa, commended by her maid, "who had Clarissa for her heart's dear friend."

"Give me," she said, "for I would laugh or cry, 'Scenes from the Life,' and 'Sensibility,' 'Winters at Bath': I would that I had one! 'The Constant Lover,' 'The Discarded Son,'[101]

"'The Rose of Raby,'[102] 'Delmore,' or 'The Nun'[103]— These promise something, and may please, perhaps, Like 'Ethelinda'[104] and the dear 'Relapse.'[105] To these her heart the gentle maid resigned And such the food that fed the gentle mind."

But even the "delicate distress" of heroines, like Niobe, all tears, palls at last, and Belinda, having wept her fill, craves now for "sterner stuff."

"Yet tales of terror are her dear delight, All in the wintry storm to read at night."

In The Preceptor Husband,[106] the pretty wife, whose notions of botany are delightfully vague, and who, in English history, light-heartedly confuses the Reformation and the Revolution, has tastes similar to those of Belinda. Pursued by an instructive husband, she turns at bay, and tells her priggish preceptor what kind of books she really enjoys:

"Well, if I must, I will my studies name, Blame if you please—I know you love to blame— When all our childish books were set apart, The first I read was 'Wanderings of the Heart.'[107] It was a story where was done a deed So dreadful that alone I feared to read. The next was 'The Confessions of a Nun'— 'Twas quite a shame such evils should be done. Nun of—no matter for the creature's name, For there are girls no nunnery can tame. Then was the story of the Haunted Hall, When the huge picture nodded from the wall,

"When the old lord looked up with trembling dread, And I grew pale and shuddered as I read. Then came the tales of Winters, Summers, Springs At Bath and Brighton—they were pretty things! No ghosts or spectres there were heard or seen, But all was love and flight to Gretna-green. Perhaps your greater learning may despise What others like—and there your wisdom lies."

To this attractive catalogue the preceptor husband, no doubt, listened with the expression of Crabbe's Old Bachelor:

"that kind of cool, contemptuous smile Of witty persons overcharged with bile,"

but she at least succeeds in interrupting his flow of information for the time being. He retires routed. Crabbe's close acquaintance with "the flowery pages of sublime distress," with "vengeful monks who play unpriestly tricks," with banditti

"who, in forest wide Or cavern vast, indignant virgins hide,"

was, as he confesses, a relic of those unregenerate days, when

"To the heroine's soul-distracting fears I early gave my sixpences and tears."[108]

He could have groped his way through a Gothic castle without the aid of a talkative housekeeper:

"I've watched a wintry night on castle-walls, I've stalked by moonlight through deserted halls, And when the weary world was sunk to rest I've had such sights—as may not be expressed. Lo! that chateau, the western tower decayed, The peasants shun it—they are all afraid; For there was done a deed—could walls reveal Or timbers tell it, how the heart would feel!

"Most horrid was it—for, behold, the floor Has stain of blood—and will be clean no more. Hark to the winds! which through the wide saloon And the long passage send a dismal tune, Music that ghosts delight in—and now heed Yon beauteous nymph, who must unmask the deed. See! with majestic sweep she swims alone Through rooms, all dreary, guided by a groan, Though windows rattle and though tap'stries shake And the feet falter every step they take. Mid groans and gibing sprites she silent goes To find a something which will soon expose The villainies and wiles of her determined foes, And having thus adventured, thus endured, Fame, wealth, and lover, are for life secured."[109]

Crabbe's Ellen Orford in The Borough (1810) is drawn from life, and in grim and bitter irony is intended as a contrast to these timorous and triumphant creatures

"borrowed and again conveyed, From book to book, the shadows of a shade."

Ellen's adventures are sordid and gloomy, without a hint of the picturesque, her distresses horrible actualities, not the "air-drawn" fancies that torture the sensitive Angelinas of Gothic fiction:

"But not like them has she been laid In ruined castle sore dismayed, Where naughty man and ghostly sprite Fill'd her pure mind with awe and dread, Stalked round the room, put out the light And shook the curtains round the bed. No cruel uncle kept her land, No tyrant father forced her hand; She had no vixen virgin aunt Without whose aid she could not eat And yet who poisoned all her meat With gibe and sneer and taunt."

Though Crabbe showed scant sympathy with the delicate sensibilities of girls who hung enraptured over the high-pitched heroics and miraculous escapes of Clementina and her kindred, he found pleasure in a robuster school of romance—the adventures of mighty Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, and Robin Hood, as set forth and embellished in the chapbooks which cottagers treasured "on the deal shelf beside the cuckoo-clock."[110] And in his poem, Sir Eustace Grey, he presents with subtle art a mind tormented by terror.



CHAPTER VIII - SCOTT AND THE NOVEL OF TERROR.

In 1775 we find Miss Lydia Languish's maid ransacking the circulating libraries of Bath, and concealing under her cloak novels of sensibility and of fashionable scandal. Some twenty years later, in the self-same city, Catherine Morland is "lost from all worldly concerns of dressing or dinner over the pages of Udolpho," and Isabella Thorpe is collecting in her pocket-book the "horrid" titles of romances from the German. In 1814, apparently, the vogue of the sentimental, the scandalous, the mysterious, and the horrid still persisted. Scott, in the introductory chapter to Waverley, disrespectfully passes in review the modish novels, which, as it proved, were doomed to be supplanted by the series of romances he was then beginning:

"Had I announced in my frontispiece, 'Waverley, A Tale of Other Days,' must not every novel reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing has been long uninhabited, and the keys either lost or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps about the middle of the second volume were doomed to guide the hero or heroine to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title page? and could it have been possible to me with a moderate attention to decorum to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet or the garrulous narrative of the heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant's hall? Again, had my title borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors and dark lanterns? Or, if I had rather chosen to call my work, 'A Sentimental Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately always finds means of transporting from castle to cottage, though she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window and is more than once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a blowsy peasant girl, whose jargon she can scarcely understand? Or again, if my Waverley had been entitled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal ... a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four in Hand, with a set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street, East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow Street Office?"

Yet Scott himself had once trodden in these well-worn paths of romance. In the general preface to the collected edition of 1829, wherein he seeks to "ravel out his weaved-up follies," he refers to "a tale of chivalry planned thirty years earlier in the style of The Castle of Otranto, with plenty of Border characters and supernatural incident." His outline of the plot and a fragment of the story, which was to be entitled Thomas the Rhymer, are printed as an appendix to the preface. Scott intended to base his story on an ancient legend, found in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, concerning the horn and sword of Thomas of Hercildoune. Cannobie Dick, a jolly horse-cowper, was led by a mysterious stranger through an opening in a hillside into a long range of stables. In every stall stood a coal-black horse, and by every horse lay a knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword in his hand. All were as still and silent as if hewn out of marble. At the far end of a gloomy hall, illuminated, like the halls of Eblis, only by torches, there lay, upon an ancient table, a horn and a sword. A voice bade Dick try his courage, warning him that much depended upon his first choosing either the horn or the sword. Dick, whose stout heart quailed before the supernatural terrors of the hall, attempted to blow the horn before unsheathing the sword. At the first feeble blast the warriors and their steeds started to life, the knights fiercely brandishing their weapons and clashing their armour. Dick made a fruitless attempt to snatch the sword. After a mysterious voice had pronounced his doom he was hurled out of the hall by a whirlwind of irresistible fury. He told his story to the shepherds, who found him dying on the cold hill side.

Regarding this legend as "an unhappy foundation for a prose story," Scott did not complete his fragment, which in style and treatment is not unlike the Gothic experiments of Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Nathan Drake. Such a story as that of the magic horn and sword might have been told in the simple words that occur naturally to a shepherd, "warmed to courage over his third tumbler," like the old peasant to whom Stevenson entrusts the terrible tale of Thrawn Janet, or to Wandering Willie, who declared:

"I whiles mak a tale serve the turn among the country bodies, and I have some fearsome anes, that mak the auld carlines shake on the settle, and bits o' bairns skirl on their minnies out frae their beds."

The personality of the narrator, swayed by the terror of his tale, would have cast the spell that Scott's carefully framed sentences fail to create. Another of Scott's disjecta membra, composed at the end of the eighteenth century, is the opening of a story called The Lord of Ennerdale, in which the family of Ratcliffe settle down before the fire to listen to a story "savouring not a little of the marvellous." As Lady Ratcliffe and her daughters

"had heard every groan and lifted every trapdoor in company with the noted heroine of Udolpho, had valorously mounted en croupe behind the horseman of Prague through all his seven translators, had followed the footsteps of Moor through the forests of Bohemia,"

and were even suspected of an acquaintance with Lewis's Monk, Scott was setting himself no easy task when he undertook to thrill these seasoned adventurers. After this prologue, which leads one to expect a banquet of horrors, only a very brief fragment of the story is forthcoming. Though he gently derides Lady Ratcliffe's literary tastes, Scott, too, was an admirer of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, and had been so entranced by Burger's Lenore that he attempted an English version.[111] It was after hearing Taylor's translation of this ballad read aloud that he uttered his dismal ejaculation: "I wish to heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones"—a whim that was speedily gratified. He, too, like Lady Ratcliffe, had read Die Raeuber; and he translated Goethe's Getz von Berlichingen. He delighted in Lewis's Tales of Wonder (1801) where the verse gallops through horrors so fearful that the "lights in the chamber burn blue," and himself contributed to the collection. He wrote "goblin dramas"[112] as terrific in intention, but not in performance, as Lewis's Castle Spectre and Maturin's Bertram. His Latin call-thesis dealt with the kind of subject "Monk" Lewis or Harrison Ainsworth or Poe might have chosen—the disposal of the dead bodies of persons legally executed. Scott continually added to his store of quaint and grisly learning both from popular tradition and from a library of such works as Bovet's Pandemonium, or the Devil's Cloyster Opened, Sinclair's Satan's Invisible World Discovered, whence he borrowed the name of the jackanapes in Wandering Willie's Tale, and the horse-shoe frown for the brow of the Redgauntlets, Heywood's Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, Joseph Taylor's History of Apparitions, from which he quotes in Woodstock. He was familiar with all the niceties of ghostly etiquette; he could distinguish at a glance the various ranks and orders of demons and spirits; he was versed in charms and spells; he knew exactly how a wizard ought to be dressed. This lore not only stood him in good stead when he compiled his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), but served to adorn his poems and novels. There was nothing unhealthy in his attitude towards the spectral world. At an inn he slept soundly in one bed of a double room, while a dead man occupied the other. Twice in his life he confessed to having felt "eerie"—once at Glamis Castle, which was said to be haunted by a Presence in a Secret Chamber, and once when he believed that he saw an apparition on his way home in the twilight; but he usually jests cheerfully when he speaks of the supernatural. He was interested in tracing the sources of terror and in studying the mechanism of ghost stories.

The axioms which he lays down are sound and suggestive:

"Ghosts should not appear too often or become too chatty. The magician shall evoke no spirits, whom he is not capable of endowing with manners and language corresponding to their supernatural character. Perhaps, to be circumstantial and abundant in minute detail and in one word ... to be somewhat prosy, is the secret mode of securing a certain necessary degree of credulity from the hearers of a ghost story... The chord which vibrates and sounds at a touch remains in silent tension under continued pressure."[113]

Scott's ghost story, The Tapestried Chamber, or the Lady in the Sacque[114] which he heard from Miss Anna Seward, who had an unexpected gift for recounting such things at country house parties, gives the impression of being carefully planned according to rule. As a human being the Lady in the Sacque had a black record, but, considered dispassionately as a ghost, her manners and deportment are irreproachable. The ghost-seer's independence of character are so firmly insisted upon that it seems impertinent to doubt the veracity of his story. My Aunt Margaret's Mirror was told to Scott in childhood by an ancient spinster, whose pleasing fancy it was to read alone in her chamber by the light of a taper fixed in a candlestick which she had formed out of a human skull, and who was learned in superstitious lore. She describes accurately the mood, when "the female imagination is in due temperature to enjoy a ghost story":

"All that is indispensable for the enjoyment of the milder feeling of supernatural awe is that you should be susceptible of the slight shuddering which creeps over you when you hear a tale of terror—that well-vouched tale which the narrator, having first expressed his general disbelief of all such legendary lore, selects and produces, as having something in it which he has been always obliged to give up as inexplicable. Another symptom is a momentary hesitation to look round you, when the interest of the narrative is at the highest; and the third, a desire to avoid looking into a mirror, when you are alone, in your chamber, for the evening."[115]

In her story "Aunt Margaret" describes how, in a magic mirror belonging to Dr. Baptista Damiotti, Lady Bothwell and her sister Lady Forester see the wedding ceremony of Sir Philip Forester and a young girl in a foreign city interrupted by Lady Forester's brother, who is slain in the duel that ensues. Scott regarded these two stories as trifles designed to while away a leisure hour. On Wandering Willie's Tale—a masterpiece of supernatural terror—he bestowed unusual care. The ill fa'urd, fearsome couple—Sir Robert with his face "gash and ghastly as Satan's," and "Major Weir," the jackanape, in his red-laced coat and wig—Steenie's eerie encounter with the "stranger" on horseback, the ribald crew of feasters in the hall are described so faithfully and in such vivid phrases that it is no wonder Willie should remark at one point of the story: "I almost think I was there mysell, though I couldna be born at the same time." The power of the tale, which fascinates us from beginning to end and which can be read again and again with renewed pleasure, depends partly on Wandering Willie's gifts as a narrator, partly on the emotions that stir him as he talks. With unconscious art, he always uses the right word in his descriptions, and chooses those details that help us to fix the rapidly changing imagery of his scenes; and he reproduces exactly the natural dialogue of the speakers. He begins in a tone of calm, unhurried narration, with only a hint of fear in his voice, but, at the death of Sir Robert, grows breathless with horror and excitement. The uncanny incident of the silver whistle that sounds from the dead man's chamber is skilfully followed by a matter-of-fact account of Steenie's dealings with the new laird. The emotion culminates in the terror of the hall of ghastly revellers, whose wild shrieks "made Willie's gudesire's very nails grow blue and chilled the marrow in his banes." So lifelike is the scene, so full of colour and movement, that Steenie's descendants might well believe that their gudesire, like Dante, had seen Hell.

The notes, introductions and appendices to Scott's works are stored with material for novels of terror. The notes to Marmion, for instance, contain references to a necromantic priest whose story "much resembles that of Ambrosio in the Monk," to an "Elfin" warrior and to a chest of treasure jealously guarded for a century by the Devil in the likeness of a huntsman. In The Lady of the Lake there is a note on the ancient legend of the Phantom Sire, in Rokeby there is an allusion to the Demon Frigate wandering under a curse from harbour to harbour. To Scott "bogle-wark" was merely a diversion. He did not choose to make it the mainspring either of his poems or his romances. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel he had, indeed, intended to make the Goblin Page play a leading part, but the imp, as Scott remarked to Miss Seward, "by the natural baseness of his propensities contrived to slink downstairs into the kitchen." The White Lady of Avenel, who appears in The Monastery (1830)—a boisterous creature who rides on horseback, splashes through streams and digs a grave—was wisely withdrawn in the sequel, The Abbot. In the Introduction Scott states:

"The White Lady is scarcely supposed to have possessed either the power or the inclination to do more than inflict terror or create embarrassment, and is always subjected by those mortals who ... could assert superiority over her."

The only apology Scott could offer to the critics who derided his wraith was that the readers "ought to allow for the capriccios of what is after all but a better sort of goblin." She was suggested by the Undine of De La Motte Fouque. In his next novel, The Fortunes of Nigel, Scott formally renounced the mystic and the magical: "Not a Cock Lane scratch—not one bounce on the drum of Tedworth—not so much as the poor tick of a solitary death-watch in the wainscot." But Scott cannot banish spectres so lightly from his imagination. Apparitions—such as the Bodach Glas who warns Fergus M'Ivor of his approaching death in Waverley, or the wraith of a Highlander in a white cockade who is seen on the battlefield in The Legend of Montrose—had appeared in his earlier novels, and others appear again and again later. In The Bride of Lammermoor—the only one of Scott's novels which might fitly be called a "tale of terror"—the atmosphere of horror and the sense of overhanging calamity effectually prepare our minds for the supernatural, and the wraith of old Alice who appears to the master of Ravenswood is strangely solemn and impressive. But even more terrible is the description of the three hags laying out her corpse. The appearance of Vanda with the Bloody Finger in the haunted chamber of the Saxon manor in The Betrothed is skilfully arranged, and Eveline's terror is described with convincing reality. In Woodstock, Scott adopted the method of explaining away the apparently supernatural, although in his Lives of the Novelists he expressly disapproves of what he calls the "precaution of Snug the joiner." Charged by Ballantyne with imitating Mrs. Radcliffe, Scott defended himself by asserting:

"My object is not to excite fear of supernatural things in my reader, but to show the effect of such fear upon the agents of the story—one a man in sense and firmness, one a man unhinged by remorse, one a stupid, unenquiring clown, one a learned and worthy but superstitious divine."[116]

As Scott in his introduction quotes the passage from a treatise entitled The Secret History of the Good Devil of Woodstock, which reveals that the mysteries were performed by one Joseph Collins with the aid of two friends, a concealed trap-door and a pound of gunpowder, he cannot justly be accused of deceiving his readers. There are suggestions of Mrs. Radcliffe's method in others of his novels. In The Antiquary, before Lovel retires to the Green Room at Monkbar, he is warned by Miss Griselda Oldbuck of a "well-fa'urd auld gentleman in a queer old-fashioned dress with whiskers turned upward on his upper lip as long as baudrons," who is wont to appear at one's bedside. He falls into an uneasy slumber, and in the middle of the night is startled to see a green huntsman leave the tapestry and turn into the "well-fa'urd auld gentleman" before his very eyes. In Old Mortality, Edith Bellenden mistakes her lover for his apparition, just as one of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines might have done. In Peveril of the Peak, Fenella's communications with the hero in his prison, when he mistakes her voice for that of a spirit, have an air of Gothic mystery. The awe-inspiring villain, who appears in Marmion and Rokeby, may be distinguished by his scowl, his passion-lined face and gleaming eye. Rashleigh, in Rob Roy, who, understanding Greek, Latin and Hebrew, "need not care for ghaist or barghaist, devil or dobbie," and whose sequestered apartment the servants durst not approach at nightfall for "fear of bogles and brownies and lang-nebbit things frae the neist world," is of the same lineage. Sir Robert Redgauntlet, too, might have stepped out of one of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. His niece is not unlike one of her heroines. She speaks in the very accents of Emily when she says:

"Now I have still so much of our family spirit as enables me to be as composed in danger as most of my sex, and upon two occasions in the course of our journey—a threatened attack by banditti, and the overturn of our carriage—I had the fortune so to conduct myself as to convey to my uncle a very favourable idea of my intrepidity."

Jeanie Deans, the most admirable and the most skilfully drawn of Scott's women, is a daring contrast to the traditional heroine of romance. The "delicate distresses" of persecuted Emilies shrink into insignificance amid the tragedy and comedy of actual life portrayed in The Waverley Novels. The tyrannical marquises, vindictive stepmothers, dark-browed villains, scheming monks, chattering domestics and fierce banditti are thrust aside by a motley crowd of living beings—soldiers, lawyers, smugglers, gypsies, shepherds, outlaws and beggars. The wax-work figures, guaranteed to thrill with nervous suspense or overflow with sensibility at the appropriate moments, are replaced by real folk like "Old Mortality," Andrew Fairservice, Dugald Dalgetty and Peter Peebles, whose humour and pathos are those of our own world. The historical background, faint, misty and unreal in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, becomes, in those of Scott, arresting and substantial. The grave, artificial dialogue in which Mrs. Radcliffe's characters habitually discourse descends to some of Scott's personages, but is often exchanged for the natural idiom of simple people. The Gothic abbey, dropped down in an uncertain, haphazard fashion, in some foreign land, is deserted for huts, barns inns, cottages and castles, solidly built on Scottish soil. We leave the mouldy air of the subterranean vault for the keen winds of the moorland. The terrors of the invisible world only fill the stray corners of his huge scene. He creates romance out of the stuff of real life.



CHAPTER IX - LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TALE OF TERROR.

As the novel of terror passes from the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe to those of "Monk" Lewis, Maturin and their imitators, there is a crashing crescendo of emotion. The villain's sardonic smile is replaced by wild outbursts of diabolical laughter, his scowl grows darker and darker, and as his designs become more bloody and more dangerous, his victims no longer sigh plaintively, but give utterance to piercing shrieks and despairing yells; tearful Amandas are unceremoniously thrust into the background by vindictive Matildas, whose passions rage in all their primitive savagery; the fearful ghost "fresh courage takes," and stands forth audaciously in the light of day; the very devil stalks shamelessly abroad in manifold disguises. We are caught up from first to last in the very tempest, torrent and whirlwind of passion. When the novel of terror thus throws restraint to the winds, outrageously o'ersteps the modesty of nature and indulges in a farrago of frightfulness, it begins to defeat its own purposes and to fail in its object of freezing the blood. The limit of human endurance has been reached—and passed. Emphasis and exaggeration have done their worst. Battle, murder, and sudden death—even spectres and fiends—can appal no more. If the old thrill is to be evoked again, the application of more ingenious methods is needed.