youthful mind; a well-intentioned work, no doubt, but which inevitably filled us with a sincere desire to taste for ourselves of these pernicious horrors. If I found them far less frightful than I had hoped, the loss was mine, and the fault lay in the matter-of-fact atmosphere of the modern nursery; for does not the author of the now forgotten Pursuits of Literature tell us that the Mysteries of Udolpho is the work of an intellectual giant?—"a mighty magician, bred and nourished by the Florentine muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the pale shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness of enchantment."
That was the way that critics used to write, and nobody dreamed of laughing at them. When Letitia Elizabeth Landon poured forth her soul in the most melancholy of verses, all London stopped to listen and to pity.
"There is no truth in love, whate'er its seeming,
And Heaven itself could scarcely seem more true.
Sadly have I awakened from the dreaming
Whose charmed slumber, false one, was of you,"
wrote this healthy and heart-whole young woman; and Lord Lytton has left us an amusing
