my terror, which he throws into relief by
occasional
glimpses of light and splendour. The journey of Alciphron
inevitably challenges comparison with that of _Vathek_, but the
spirit of mockery that animates Beckford's story is wholly
absent. Moore paints a theatrical panorama of effective scenes,
but his figures are mere shadows.

The miseries of an existence, prolonged far beyond the allotted
span, are depicted not only in stories of the elixir of life, but
in the legends centring round the Wandering Jew. Croly's
_Salathiel_ (1829), like Eugene Sue's lengthy romance, _Le Juif
Errant_, won fame in its own day, but is now forgotten. Some of
Croly's descriptions, such as that of the burning trireme, have a
certain dazzling magnificence, but the colouring is often crude
and startling. The figure of the deathless Jew is apt to be lost
amid the mazes of the author's rhetoric. The conception of a man
doomed to wander eternally in expiation of a curse is in itself
an arresting theme likely to attract a romantic writer, but the
record of his adventures may easily become monotonous.

The "novel of terror" has found few more ardent admirers than the
youthful Shelley, who saw in it a way of escape from the harsh
realities and dull routine of ordinary existence. From his
childhood the world of ideas seems to have been at least as real
and familiar to him as the material world. The fabulous beings of
whom he talked to his young sisters--the Great Tortoise in
Warnham Pond, the snake three hundred years old in the garden at
Field Place, the grey-bearded alchemist in his garret[90]--had
probably for him as much meaning and interest as the living
people around him. Urged by a restless desire to evade the
natural and encounter the supernatural, he wandered by night
under the "perilous moonshine," haunted graveyards in the hope of
"high talk with the departed dead," dabbled in chemical
experiments and pored over ancient books of magic. It was to be
expected that an imagination reaching out so eagerly towards the
unknown should find refuge from the uncongenial life of Sion
House School in the soul-stirring region of romance. Transported
by sixpenny "blue books" and the many volumed novels in the
Brentford circulating library, Shelley's imagination fled
joyously to that land of unlikelihood, where the earth yawns with
bandits' caverns inhabited by desperadoes with bloody daggers,
where the air continually resounds with the shrieks and