garments of a bridegroom.” The ceremony proceeds. The grand organ peals; the heavenly voices of white-robed choristers added greatly to the beauty of the scene. “But hark! another noise is heard; sulphureous smoke half fills the sacred building; the floor opens for an instant; and mocking shrieks are audible as the spirit of the Last of the Vampires descended into perdition.”
I am bound to acknowledge that after a somewhat careful reading of this curious and most disjointed little piece of seventy-six pages the only impression with which I am met is that Mr. Smyth Upton knew nothing whatsoever of what the word vampire connotes. The idea of the victims who are sacrificed for the sake of eternal youth is, of course fairly common and was very effectively utilized by G. W. M. Reynolds in his romance The Necromancer, which ran in Reynolds’s Miscellany from Saturday, 27th December, 1851, to Saturday, 31st July, 1852.[66] Incidentally it may be remarked as a somewhat curious fact that this prolific novelist never availed himself of the vampire tradition in his melodramatic chapters.
The Vampyre. “By the Wife of a Medical Man,” 1858, is a violent teetotal tract, of twenty-seven short chapters presented in the guise of fiction. The villain of the piece is “The Vampyre Inn,” and the dipsomaniac hero—if it be allowable to use the term in such a context—is given to ravings such as these: “They fly—they bite—they suck my blood—I die. That hideous ‘Vampyre!’ Its eyes pierce me thro’—they are red—they are bloodshot. Tear it from my pillow. I dare not lie down. It bites—I die! Give me brandy—brandy—more brandy.”
A Vampire of Souls, by H. M. P., published in 1904, is a book of little value. The hero, George Ventnor, when aged twenty, is killed in a railway accident, and the narrative consists of his after experiences which are singularly material and crude. There is, perhaps, a good touch here and there, but the thing certainly does not deserve to be rescued from oblivion.
It will have been noticed that beyond the titles these two last works have really little or nothing to do with vampires at all, but we may now consider a romance which may at least be ranked as a very serious rival to—in my opinion it is far ghostlier than—its famous successor Dracula. Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood, is undoubtedly the best novel
