the amenities of Vrilya
and Intelligences, we miss the vulgar blatancy of an honest,
old-fashioned spectre.

CHAPTER X - SHORT TALES OF TERROR.

For the readers of their own day the Gothic romances of Walpole,
Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe possessed the charm of novelty.
Before the close of the century we may trace, in the
conversations of Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in
_Northanger Abbey_, symptoms of a longing for more poignant
excitement. It was at this time that Mrs. Radcliffe, after the
publication of _The Italian_ in 1797, retired quietly from the
field. From her obscurity she viewed no doubt with some disdain
the vulgar achievements of "Monk" Lewis and a tribe of imitators,
who compounded a farrago of horrors as thick and slab as the
contents of a witch's cauldron. Until the appearance in 1820 of
Maturin's _Melmoth_, which was redeemed by its psychological
insight and its vigorous style, the Gothic romance maintained a
disreputable existence in the hands of those who looked upon
fiction as a lucrative trade, not as an art. In the meantime,
however, an easy device had been discovered for pandering to the
popular craving for excitement. Ingenious authors realised that
it was possible to compress into the five pages of a short story
as much sensation as was contained in the five volumes of a
Gothic romance. For the brevity of the tales, which were issued
in chapbooks, readers were compensated by gaudily coloured
illustrations and by double-barrelled titles. An anthology called
"Wild Roses" (published by Anne Lemoine, Coleman Street, n.d.)
included: _Twelve O'Clock or the Three Robbers, The Monks of
Cluny, or Castle Acre Monastery, The Tomb of Aurora, or The
Mysterious Summons, The Mysterious Spaniard, or The Ruins of St.
Luke's Abbey_, and lastly, as a _bonne bouche_, _Barbastal, or
The Magician of the Forest of the Bloody Ash_.[127] There are
many collections of this kind, some of them dating back to 1806,
among the chapbooks in the British Museum. It is in these brief,
blood-curdling romances that we may find the origin of the short
tale of terror, which became so popular a form of literature in
the nineteenth century. The taste for these delicious morsels has
lingered long. Dante Gabriel Rossetti delighted in _Brigand
Tales, Tales of Chivalry, Tales of Wonder, Legends of Terror_;
and it was in search of such booty, "a penny plain and twopence
coloured" that, more than fifty years later, Rob