other senses--hints of all sorts, which were to become
common tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.

At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of
the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in
others--the result of what the French vividly call _enfisting_ the
reader--getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant
fashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the
author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to
explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous
to us. With the proviso of _valeat quantum_, it is not quite unfair to
dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of
Mrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering--the famous incident of the Black
Veil--is produced by a piece of wax-work. But the result resulted--the
effect _was_ produced: and it was left to those who were clever enough
to improve upon the means. For the time these means were "improved upon"
in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intended
and unintended, later. For the present we may turn to other varieties of
the curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of the
century, and especially of the very last.

If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's _Henry_ (1795) in the
fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary to
notice "Sir Fretful Plagiary's" contributions to the subject of our
history. He preluded it with another, _Arundel_ (1789), and followed it
much later with a third, _John de Lancaster_: but there is no need to
say anything of these. _Henry_ displays the odd hit-_and_-miss quality
which seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether as
novelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else. It
is, though by no means a mere "plagiarism," an obvious and avowed
imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his _pastiche_
that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equal
oblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly two
generations had passed. Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more
elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and
repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a _dissenting_
Adams--the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter
perhaps did not feel. There are some good things in the story, but, as a
whole, it is chiefly v