ublication, at thirty-six
shillings for the seven volumes. Samuel Rogers recalled Lane, the
head of the firm, riding in a carriage and pair with two footmen,
wearing gold cockades.[54] Scott was careful not to disclose the
names of the novelists he derided, but his hamper probably
contained a selection of Mrs. Parsons' sixty works, and perhaps
two of Miss Wilkinson's, with their alluring titles, _The Priory
of St. Clair, or The Spectre of the Murdered Nun_; _The Convent
of the Grey Penitents, or The Apostate Nun_. Perchance, he found
there Mrs. Henrietta Rouviere's romance, (published in the same
year as _Montorio_,) _A Peep at our Ancestors_ (1807), describing
the reign of King Stephen. Mrs. Rouviere, in her preface,

"flatters herself that, aided by records and documents,
she may have succeeded in a correct though faint sketch
of the times she treats, and in affording, if through a
dim yet not distorted nor discoloured glass, A Peep at
our Ancestors";

but her story is entirely devoid of the colour with which Mrs.
Radcliffe, her model, contrived to decorate the past. It is,
moreover, written in a style so opaque that it obscures her
images from view as effectually as a piece of ground glass. To
describe the approach of twilight--an hour beloved by writers of
romance--she attempts a turgid paraphrase of Gray's Elegy:

"The grey shades of an autumnal evening gradually stole
over the horizon, progressively throwing a duskier hue
on the surrounding objects till glimmering confusion
encompassing the earth shut from the accustomed eye the
well-known view, leaving conjecture to mark its
boundaries."

The adventures of Adelaide and her lover, Walter of Gloucester,
are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to
"leave to conjecture" their interminable vicissitudes. The names
of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may
be garnered by those who will, from such works as _Living
Authors_ (1817), or from the four volumes of Watts' elaborate
compilation, the _Bibliotheca Britannica_ (1824). The titles are,
indeed, lighter and more entertaining reading than the books
themselves. Anyone might reasonably expect to read _Midnight
Horrors, or The Bandit's Daughter_, as Henry Tilney vows he read
_The Mysteries of Udolpho_, with "hair on end all the time"; but
the actual story, notwithstanding a wandering ball of fire, that
acts as guide throu