subtle, and the scenes between
the pair show an extraordinary advance on Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier art.
The mysterious Monk who counteracts Schedoni remains an unsolved mystery
to me, but of that I do not complain. He is as good as the Dweller in
the Catacombs who haunts Miriam in Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." The
Inquisition, its cells, and its tribunals are coloured

"As when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse."

The comic valet, Paulo, who insists on being locked up in the dungeons of
the Inquisition merely because his master is there, reminds one of Samuel
Weller, he is a Neapolitan Samivel. The escapes are Mrs. Radcliffe's
most exciting escapes, and to say that is to say a good deal. Poetry is
not written, or not often, by the heroine. The scene in which Schedoni
has his dagger raised to murder Ellena, when he discovers that she is his
daughter, "is of a new, grand, and powerful character" (Scott), while it
is even more satisfactory to learn later that Ellena was _not_ Schedoni's
daughter after all.

Why Mrs. Radcliffe, having reached such a pitch of success, never again
published a novel, remains more mysterious than any of her Mysteries.
Scott justly remarks that her censors attacked her "by showing that she
does not possess the excellences proper to a style of composition totally
different from that which she has attempted." This is the usual way of
reviewers. Tales that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, "which
possess charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and gay, the
gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be dismissed with a sneer by
people who have never read them. Following Horace Walpole in some
degree, Mrs. Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis,
and Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled the gap between Smollett
and Miss Austen. Mrs. Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance
burning much more steadily than the lamps which, in her novels, are
always blown out, in the moment of excited apprehension, by the night
wind walking in the dank corridors of haunted abbeys. But mark the
cruelty of an intellectual parent! Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe's
father in the spirit. Yet, on September 4, 1794, he wrote to Lady
Ossory: "I have read some of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your
Ladyship says I was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and
Mrs. Radcliffe?). "All I can say for myself is that I