ve remained, during the last hundred years, uncut,
even to this day, and I have had to apply the paper knife to many an
author, from Alciphron (1790) to Mr. Max Muller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill's
edition of Bozzy's "Life of Dr. Johnson." But Mrs. Radcliffe has been
read diligently, and copiously annotated.

This lady was, in a literary sense, and though, like the sire of Evelina,
he cast her off, the daughter of Horace Walpole. Just when King Romance
seemed as dead as Queen Anne, Walpole produced that Gothic tale, "The
Castle of Otranto," in 1764. In that very year was born Anne Ward, who,
in 1787, married William Radcliffe, Esq., M.A., Oxon. In 1789 she
published "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne." The scene, she tells us,
is laid in "the most romantic part of the Highlands, the north-east coast
of Scotland." On castles, anywhere, she doted. Walpole, not Smollett or
Miss Burney, inspired her with a passion for these homes of old romance.
But the north-east coast of Scotland is hardly part of the Highlands at
all, and is far from being very romantic. The period is "the dark ages"
in general. Yet the captive Earl, when "the sweet tranquillity of
evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind . . . composed
the following sonnet, which (having committed it to paper) he the next
evening dropped upon the terrace. He had the pleasure to observe that
the paper was taken up by the ladies, who immediately retired into the
castle." These were not the manners of the local Mackays, of the
Sinclairs, and of "the small but fierce clan of Gunn," in the dark ages.

But this was Mrs. Radcliffe's way. She delighted in descriptions of
scenery, the more romantic the better, and usually drawn entirely from
her inner consciousness. Her heroines write sonnets (which never but
once _are_ sonnets) and other lyrics, on every occasion. With his usual
generosity Scott praised her landscape and her lyrics, but, indeed, they
are, as Sir Walter said of Mrs. Hemans, "too poetical," and probably they
were skipped, even by her contemporary devotees. "The Castles of Athlin
and Dunbayne" frankly do not permit themselves to be read, and it was not
till 1790, with "A Sicilian Romance," that Mrs. Radcliffe "found
herself," and her public. After reading, with breathless haste, through,
"A Sicilian Romance," and "The Romance of the Forest," in a single day,
it would ill become me to speak lightly of Mrs. Radcliffe. Like
Catherine Morla