e elaborate intrigue of Lovelace, moves within a
narrow circle, devoting himself, not to the portrayal of
character, but to the minute analysis of a woman's heart. The
sentiment of Richardson descends to Mrs. Radcliffe. Her heroines
are fashioned in the likeness of Clarissa Harlowe; her heroes
inherit many of the traits of the immaculate Grandison. She adds
zest to her plots by wafting her heroines to distant climes and
bygone centuries, and by playing on their nerves with
superstitious fears. Since human nature often looks to fiction
for a refuge from the world, there is always room for the
illusion of romance side by side with the picture of actual life.
Fanny Burney's spirited record of Evelina's visit to her vulgar,
but human, relatives, the Branghtons, in London, is not enough.
We need too the sojourn of Emily, with her thick-coming fancies,
in the castle of Udolpho.

The Gothic Romance did not reflect real life, or reveal
character, or display humour. Its aim was different. It was full
of sentimentality, and it stirred the emotions of pity and fear.
The ethereal, sensitive heroine, suffering through no fault of
her own, could not fail to win sympathy. The hero was pale,
melancholy, and unfortunate enough to be attractive. The villain,
bold and desperate in his crimes, was secretly admired as well as
feared. Hairbreadth escapes and wicked intrigues in castles built
over beetling precipices were sufficiently outside the reader's
own experience to produce a thrill. Ghosts, and rumours of
ghosts, touched nearly the eighteenth century reader, who had
often listened, with bated breath, to winter's tales of spirits
seen on Halloween in the churchyard, or white-robed spectres
encountered in dark lanes and lonely ruins. In country houses
like those described in Miss Austen's novels, where life was
diversified only by paying calls, dining out, taking gentle
exercise or playing round games like "commerce" or "word-making
and work-taking," the Gothic Romances must have proved a welcome
source of pleasurable excitement. Mr. Woodhouse, with his
melancholy views on the effects of wedding cake and muffin, would
have condemned them, no doubt, as unwholesome; Lady Catherine de
Bourgh would have been too impatient to read them; but Lydia
Bennet, Elinor Dashwood and Isabella Thorpe must have found in
them an inestimable solace. Their fame was soon overshadowed by
that of the Waverley Novels, but they had served their turn in
prov