e thirty years, and was
widely popular for nearly fifty.

Anne Radcliffe, whose maiden name was Ward, was born on 9th July 1764
and died on 7th February 1822. One of her novels, _Gaston de
Blondeville_, was published posthumously; but otherwise her whole
literary production took place between the years 1789 and 1797. The
first of these years saw _The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_, a very
immature work; the last _The Italian_, which is perhaps the best.
Between them appeared _A Sicilian Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the
Forest_ (1791), and the far-famed _Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1795.
Matthew Gregory Lewis, who, like Beckford, was a West-Indian landowner
and member for Hindon, and was well-to-do if not extremely wealthy, was
nine years younger than Mrs. Radcliffe, and did not produce his famous
_Monk_ till the same year which saw _Udolpho_. He published a good deal
of other work in prose, verse, and drama; the most noteworthy of the
second class being _Tales of Terror_, to which Scott contributed, and
the most noteworthy of the third _The Castle Spectre_. Lewis, who,
despite some foibles, was decidedly popular in the literary and
fashionable society of his time, died in 1818 at the age of forty-five
on his way home from the West Indies. Although he would have us
understand that _The Monk_ was written some time before its actual
publication, Lewis' position as a direct imitator of Mrs. Radcliffe is
unmistakable; and although he added to the characteristics of her novels
a certain appeal to "Lubricity" from which she was completely free, the
general scheme of the two writers, as well as that of all their school,
varies hardly at all. The supernatural in Mrs. Radcliffe's case is
mainly, if not wholly, what has been called "the explained
supernatural,"--that is to say, the apparently ghostly, and certainly
ghastly, effects are usually if not always traced to natural causes,
while in most if not all of her followers the demand for more highly
spiced fare in the reader, and perhaps a defect of ingenuity in the
writer, leaves the devils and witches as they were. In all, without
exception, castles with secret passages, trap-doors, forests, banditti,
abductions, sliding panels, and other apparatus and paraphernalia of the
kind play the main part. The actual literary value is, on the whole,
low; though Mrs. Radcliffe is not without glimmerings, and it is
exceedingly curious to note that, just before the historical novel was