which she had forced an entrance. Not perceiving that the very effect of her romances was dependent on the skill with which she knew how to relax, as well as to press, the springs of terror and suspense;—to transport the reader, wearied with the darkness visible of Apennine castles, or the scenes of torture in the vaults of the Inquisition, to the moon-illumined streets of Venice, or the sunset dance by the Bay of Naples;—from the fierce encounters of condottieri, to the quiet and mournful solitude of Le Blanc or La Vallee—they laboured to eclipse her in her own field by the simple expedient of crowding wonders and terrors on each other without an interval of repose. In their hands, her 'dreary passages,' always too long, now became ten times longer and more intricate; the castles more and more perplexing in their architecture; the personnel of the robbers more truculent; the gleam of daggers more incessant; the faces of the monks more cadaverous; and the visits of ghosts so unjustifiably obtrusive, that they came at length to be viewed with as much indifference by the reader as they were of old by Aubrey or Dr Dee. No wonder if this school of romance—which, resting as it undoubtedly does, at the best, on no very elevated sources of interest, requires peculiar caution and dexterity in the handling of its materials—should soon have fallen into utter discredit, from the coarse, bungling workmanship of its disciples, and should now recall to our recollection little else than a mass of puerile and revolting absurdity, into the perusal of which we are ashamed to think that, even in boyish days, we should ever have been betrayed.
But Mrs Radcliffe was as truly an inventor, a great and original writer in the department she had struck out for herself—whether that department was of the highest kind or not—as the Richardsons, Fieldings, and Smolletts, whom she succeeded and for a time threw into the shade; or the Ariosto of the North, before whom her own star has paled its ineffectual fires. The passion of fear,—'the latent sense of supernatural awe, and curiosity concerning whatever is hidden and mysterious'—these were themes and sources of interest which, prior to the appearance of her tales, could scarcely be said to be touched on. The Castle of Otranto was too obviously a mere caprice of imagination; its gigantic helmets, its pictures descending from their frames, its spectral figures dilating themselves in the moonlight to the height of the castle battlements—if they did not border on the ludicrous, no more impressed the mind with any feeling of awe, than the enchantments and talismans, the genii and peris, of the Arabian Nights. A nearer approach to the proper tone of feeling, was made in the Old English Baron; but while it
