d
modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much real
delectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive and
many more indirect and comparative merits. The influence on Scott is not
the least of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset of the
same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byron
himself, is Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Schedoni did much more than beget or
pattern Lara: he _is_ Lara, to all intents and purposes, in "first
state" and before the final touch has been put by the greater master who
took the plate in hand.

But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. Her
"explained supernatural," tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays,
is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity: and this same quality
extends to her plots generally. The historical side of her novels (which
she does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kind
was before Scott: that we may leave till we come to Scott himself. But
one important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion which
had never been managed before, and that is elaborate description. She
shows an early adaptation of that "picturesque," of which we see the
beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was being
directly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her
_Travels_, she had got not merely from books, but from her own
observation. She applies it both within and without: at one moment
giving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on
the furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests and the
cataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a
"melancholy purple tint" steals up the slopes to its foundations--are
all in the day's work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair to
say that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well. The "high canopied tester of
dark green damask" and the "counterpane of black velvet" which
illustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall in
Chateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now: but, once more, they
were not so then. And this faculty of description (which, as noted
above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got from
books, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately,
got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways--touches of really or
supposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, or
of appeals to the