m a treatise
entitled _The Secret History of the Good Devil of Woodstock_,
which reveals that the mysteries were performed by one Joseph
Collins with the aid of two friends, a concealed trap-door and a
pound of gunpowder, he cannot justly be accused of deceiving his
readers. There are suggestions of Mrs. Radcliffe's method in
others of his novels. In _The Antiquary_, before Lovel retires to
the Green Room at Monkbar, he is warned by Miss Griselda Oldbuck
of a "well-fa'urd auld gentleman in a queer old-fashioned dress
with whiskers turned upward on his upper lip as long as
baudrons," who is wont to appear at one's bedside. He falls into
an uneasy slumber, and in the middle of the night is startled to
see a green huntsman leave the tapestry and turn into the
"well-fa'urd auld gentleman" before his very eyes. In _Old
Mortality_, Edith Bellenden mistakes her lover for his
apparition, just as one of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines might have
done. In _Peveril of the Peak_, Fenella's communications with the
hero in his prison, when he mistakes her voice for that of a
spirit, have an air of Gothic mystery. The awe-inspiring villain,
who appears in _Marmion_ and _Rokeby_, may be distinguished by
his scowl, his passion-lined face and gleaming eye. Rashleigh, in
_Rob Roy_, who, understanding Greek, Latin and Hebrew, "need not
care for ghaist or barghaist, devil or dobbie," and whose
sequestered apartment the servants durst not approach at
nightfall for "fear of bogles and brownies and lang-nebbit things
frae the neist world," is of the same lineage. Sir Robert
Redgauntlet, too, might have stepped out of one of Mrs.
Radcliffe's romances. His niece is not unlike one of her
heroines. She speaks in the very accents of Emily when she says:

"Now I have still so much of our family spirit as
enables me to be as composed in danger as most of my
sex, and upon two occasions in the course of our
journey--a threatened attack by banditti, and the
overturn of our carriage--I had the fortune so to
conduct myself as to convey to my uncle a very
favourable idea of my intrepidity."

Jeanie Deans, the most admirable and the most skilfully drawn of
Scott's women, is a daring contrast to the traditional heroine of
romance. The "delicate distresses" of persecuted Emilies shrink
into insignificance amid the tragedy and comedy of actual life
portrayed in The Waverley Novels. The tyrannical marquises,
vindictive stepmot