of its
kind--is something of a person in herself, but less of a figure in
history, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately.
Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's _Recess_
(1783-1786), as Miss Porter did for _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, but the claim
can be even less allowed. There is nothing of real historical spirit,
and very little goodness of any kind, in _The Recess. The Canterbury
Tales_ (1797-1805) (so named merely because they are supposed to be told
by different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the _Percy
Anecdotes_ and other things--either irresponsibly or impishly. They are
not exactly bad: but also as far as possible from consummateness.

On the other hand, _The Convent of Grey Penitents_, one of the crops
which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imagination
with the spade of her style, _is_ very nearly consummate--in badness. It
is a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat
Lewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis di
Zoretti was an Italian nobleman--"one of those characters in whose bosom
resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["_thirst_ of _avarice_" is
good!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of
Rosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by his
lordship" for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: she
goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Their
son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by
wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head,
Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as
worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if
not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which
issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on
persons of genius, gave us _Zastrozzi_ on the one side and _Northanger
Abbey_ on the other.

As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouviere, she represents the
other school of abortive historical novel. _A Peep at Our Ancestors_
(1807) is fairly worthy of its ridiculous name. It is preceded by
expressions of thanks to the authorities of "the British Museum and the
Heralds' Office" for the "access to records" vouchsafed to its author.
As the date of the story is 1146 (it wa