dy to ensnare him. The
morning after the recital of this gruesome story, the host reads
aloud to his guests a manuscript entrusted to him, together with
a portrait, by a young Italian. This youth, it chances, learnt
painting with a monk, who, as a penance, drew pictures, or
modelled waxen images, representing death and corruption, a
detail which reminds us of what was concealed by the Black Veil
in _Udolpho_. He later falls in love with his model, Bianca, who,
during his absence abroad, marries his friend Filippo. In a
jealous rage the young Italian slays his rival, and is
unceasingly haunted by his phantom. Washington Irving has no
desire to endure for long the atmosphere of mystery and horror
his story has created, and quickly relieves the tension by a
return to ordinary life. The host promises to show the picture,
which is said to affect all beholders in an extraordinary
fashion, to each of his guests in turn. They all profess
themselves remarkably affected by it, until the host confesses
that he has too sincere a regard for the feelings of the young
Italian to reveal the actual picture to any of them; With this
moment of disillusionment the strange stories come to an end. The
title, _Tales of a Traveller_, under which Irving placed his
tales of terror, indicates the mood in which he fashioned them.
He regarded them much as he would regard the wonderful adventures
of Baron Munchausen. They were to be taken, like one of Dr.
Marigold's prescriptions, with a grain of salt. The idea of
blending levity with horror, suggested perhaps by German
influence, was very popular in England and France at this period.
Balzac's _L'Auberge Rouge_ and _L'Elixir de la Longue Vie_ are
written in a similar mood.

It is not always the boldest and most adventurous beings who
elect to dwell amid "calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire."
The "virtuous mind," whom supernatural horrors may "startle well
but not astound," sometimes finds a melancholy pleasure in
beguiling weaker mortals into haunted ruins to watch their firm
nerves tremble. Sometimes too, though a man be wholly innocent of
the desire to alarm, he is led astray, whether he will or not,
among the terrors of the invisible world. Grey ghosts steal into
his imagination unawares. It was so that they came to Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who speaks sorrowfully of "gaily dressed fantasies
turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves." He would
gladly have written a "sunshiny" bo