nd, I love this lady's tender yet terrific fancy.

Mrs. Radcliffe does not always keep on her highest level, but we must
remember that her last romance, "The Italian," is by far her best. She
had been feeling her way to this pitch of excellence, and, when she had
attained to it, she published no more. The reason is uncertain. She
became a Woman's Rights woman, and wrote "The Female Advocate," not a
novel! Scott thinks that she may have been annoyed by her imitators, or
by her critics, against whom he defends her in an admirable passage, to
be cited later. Meanwhile let us follow Mrs. Radcliffe in her upward
course.

The "Sicilian Romance" appeared in 1790, when the author's age was twenty-
six. The book has a treble attraction, for it contains the germ of
"Northanger Abbey," and the germ of "Jane Eyre," and--the germ of Byron!
Like "Joseph Andrews," "Northanger Abbey" began as a parody (of Mrs.
Radcliffe) and developed into a real novel of character. So too Byron's
gloomy scowling adventurers, with their darkling past, are mere
repetitions in rhyme of Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni. This is so obvious
that, when discussing Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni, Scott adds, in a note,
parallel passages from Byron's "Giaour." Sir Walter did not mean to
mock, he merely compared two kindred spirits. "The noble poet" "kept on
the business still," and broke into octosyllabics, borrowed from Scott,
his descriptions of miscreants borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe.

"A Sicilian Romance" has its scene in the palace of Ferdinand, fifth
Marquis of Mazzini, on the northern coast of Sicily. The time is about
1580, but there is nothing in the manners or costume to indicate that, or
any other period. Such "local colour" was unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, as
to Clara Reeve. In Horace Walpole, however, a character goes so far in
the mediaeval way as to say "by my halidome."

The Marquis Mazzini had one son and two daughters by his first amiable
consort, supposed to be long dead when the story opens. The son is the
original of Henry Tilney in "Northanger Abbey," and in General Tilney
does Catherine Morland recognise a modern Marquis of Mazzini. But the
Marquis's wife, to be sure, is _not_ dead; like the first Mrs. Rochester
she is concealed about the back premises, and, as in "Jane Eyre," it is
her movements, and those of her gaolers, that produce mystery, and make
the reader suppose that "the place is haunted." It is, of course, only
the myster