ny other
heroines, is drugged and conveyed as a corpse to the Count de
Valve's Gothic castle. She comes to life only to be slain before
the high altar, and revenges herself after death by haunting the
count regularly every night. _The Fugitive Countess or Convent of
St. Ursula_ (1807) contains three spicy ingredients--a mock
burial, a concealed wife and a mouldering manuscript. The social
status of Miss Wilkinson's characters is invariably lofty, for no
self-respecting ghost ever troubles the middle classes; and her
manner is as ambitious as her matter. Her personages, in _Lopez
and Aranthe_, behave and talk thus:

"Heavenly powers!" exclaimed Aranthe, "it is Dorimont, or else my
eyes deceive me!" Overpowered with surprise and almost
breathless, she sunk on the carpet. Lopez stood aghast, his
countenance was of a deadly pale, a glass of wine he had in his
hand he let fall to the floor, while he articulated: "What an
alteration in that once beauteous countenance!"

Miss Wilkinson's sentences stagger and lurch uncertainly, but she
delights in similes and other ornaments of style:

"Adeline Barnett was fair as a lily, tall as the pine,
her fine dark eyes sparkling as diamonds, and she moved
with the majestic air of a goddess, but pride and
ambition appeared on the brow of this famed maiden, and
destroying the effect of her charms."

She is, in fact, more addicted to "gramarye" than to
"grammar"--the fault with which Byron, in a note to _English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, charged the hero and heroine of
Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_. Her heroes do not merely
love, they are "enamoured to a romantic degree." Her arbours are
"composed of jasmine, white rose, and other odoriferous sweets of
Flora." She sprinkles French phrases with an airy nonchalance
worthy of the Lady Hysterica Belamour, whose memoirs are included
in Barrett's _Heroine_. Her duchesses "figure away with
_eclat_"--"a party _quarrie_ assemble at their _dejeune_." It is
noteworthy that by 1820 even Miss Wilkinson had learnt to despise
the spectres in whom she had gloried during her amazing career.
In _The Spectre of Lanmere Abbey_ (1820) the ghost is
ignominiously exposed, and proved to be "a tall figure dressed in
white, and a long, transparent veil flowing over her whole
figure," while the heroine Amelia speaks almost in the accents of
Catherine Morland:

"My governess has been affirming that there are Gothic