mething like _coionnerie_; it is Romance that
has given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and
the vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but
eternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the whole, even in
its best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form. It was
Beckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparable
from Romance. But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to
Romance herself.

[14] Since the text was written--indeed very recently--the
long-missing "Episodes" of _Vathek_ itself have been at length
supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They
are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.

Still, _Vatheks_ are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted,
to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century,
some other kind had to be supplied. The chief accredited purveyors of it
have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by
the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel,
now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of
the eighteenth century.

It is, however, unjust to put the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_
and the author of _The Monk_ on the same level. Mat Lewis was a clever
boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating
popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and
no faculty of self-criticism to correct it. The famous _Monk_ (1795),
which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as _Otranto_
and adds to its preposterousness a _haut gout_ of atrocity and indecency
which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of
letters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms
is less offensive: but--except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not
here concern us--hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us is
that the time took it for literature, because it adopted the
terror-style in fiction.

Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not
hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his
wife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of
terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of
principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to observe
strict "propriety" in her books--a point in which the no