vel had always
been a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also more
original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the
supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German
adoption of it, but never to allow anything _really_ supernatural in
ultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these two
principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the
same story--the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and
her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, _The Castles of
Athlin and Dunbayne_, appeared as early as 1789: and she left a
posthumous romance, _Gaston de Blondeville_, which did not come out till
1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume
of _Travels_ (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed
presently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in
seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, _A Sicilian
Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the Forest_ (1791), the world-renowned
_Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1794-1795, and _The Italian_ two years later.

These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by
the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial
faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly
diffused and kept up. Very little that is terrible actually happens: but
the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar)
in persuading you that something very terrible is _going_ to happen, or
has just happened. And so the delight of something "horrid," as the
Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more
plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real
horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In one
sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical
examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious
mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these "ados"
are most cunningly made (her last book, _The Italian_, is, perhaps, the
best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole
subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe's great praise
is that she induced her original readers to suspend their critical
faculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously. Scott,
who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius: an