ose from beneath where he stood," and when he
tried to force a door (there are scores of such weird doors in Mrs.
Radcliffe) "a groan was repeated, more hollow and dreadful than the
first. His courage forsook him"--and no wonder! Of course he could not
know that the author of the groans was, in fact, his long-lost mother,
immured by his father, the wicked Marquis. We need not follow the
narrative through the darkling crimes and crumbling galleries of this
terrible castle on the north coast of Sicily. Everybody is always
"gazing in silent terror," and all the locks are rusty. "A savage and
dexterous banditti" play a prominent part, and the imprisoned Ferdinand
"did not hesitate to believe that the moans he heard came from the
restless spirit of the murdered della Campo." No working hypothesis
could seem more plausible, but it was erroneous. Mrs. Radcliffe does not
deal in a single avowed ghost. She finally explains away, by normal
causes, everything that she does not forget to explain. At the most, she
indulges herself in a premonitory dream. On this point she is true to
common sense, without quite adopting the philosophy of David Hume. "I do
not say that spirits have appeared," she remarks, "but if several
discreet unprejudiced persons were to assure me that they had seen one--I
should not be bold or proud enough to reply, it is impossible!" But Hume
_was_ bold and proud enough: he went further than Mrs. Radcliffe.

Scott censures Mrs. Radcliffe's employment of explanations. He is in
favour of "boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery," or of
leaving the matter in the vague, as in the appearance of the wraith of
the dying Alice to Ravenswood. But, in Mrs. Radcliffe's day, common
sense was so tyrannical, that the poor lady's romances would have been
excluded from families, if she had not provided normal explanations of
her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures. The ghost-hunt
in the castle finally brings Julia to a door, whose bolts, "strengthened
by desperation, she forced back." There was a middle-aged lady in the
room, who, after steadily gazing on Julia, "suddenly exclaimed, 'My
daughter!' and fainted away." Julia being about seventeen, and Madame
Mazzini, her mamma, having been immured for fifteen years, we observe, in
this recognition, the force of the maternal instinct.

The wicked Marquis was poisoned by the partner of his iniquities, who
anon stabbed herself with a poniard