length, which total 604 pages, and I have not selected these on account of their exceptional volume.
Varney the Vampire was among the most popular of Prest’s productions, and on account of its “unprecedented success” it was reprinted in 1853 in penny parts. To-day the book is unprocurable and considerable sums have been for many years in vain offered to secure a copy. Indeed, it may be noted that all Prest’s work is excessively scarce.
It is hardly an exaggeration to affirm that of recent years there have been few books which have been more popular than Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A tale, and certainly there is no sensational romance which in modern days has achieved so universal a reputation. Since it was first published in 1897, that is to say one and twenty years ago, it has run into a great number of editions, and the name has veritably become a household word. It will prove interesting to inquire into the immediate causes which have brought this book such wide and enduring fame. It has already been remarked that it is well-nigh impossible for a story which deals with the supernatural or the horrible to be sustained to any great length. Elements which at first are almost unendurable will lose their effect if they are continued, for the reader’s mind insensibly becomes inured to fresh emotions of awe and horror, and Dracula is by no means briefly told. In the ordinary reprints (Tenth Edition, 1913) it extends to more than four hundred pages, nor does it escape the penalty of its prolixity. The first part, “Jonathan Harker’s Journal,” which consists of four chapters is most admirably done, and could the whole story have been sustained at so high a level we should have had a complete masterpiece. But that were scarcely possible. The description of the journey through Transylvania is interesting to a degree, and even has passages which attain to something like charm. “All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.” Very effective is the arrival of the English traveller at the “vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose
