aim at psychological niceties, and we must not blame her for withholding
what it was no part of her purpose to give. "The Romance of the Forest"
was, so far, infinitely the most thrilling of modern English works of
fiction. "Every reader felt the force," says Scott, "from the sage in
his study, to the family group in middle life," and nobody felt it more
than Scott himself, then a young gentleman of nineteen, who, when asked
how his time was employed, answered, "I read no Civil Law." He did read
Mrs. Radcliffe, and, in "The Betrothed," followed her example in the
story of the haunted chamber where the heroine faces the spectre attached
to her ancient family.

"The Mysteries of Udolpho," Mrs. Radcliffe's next and most celebrated
work, is not (in the judgment of this reader, at least) her masterpiece.
The booksellers paid her what Scott, erroneously, calls "the
unprecedented sum of 500 pounds" for the romance, and they must have made
a profitable bargain. "The public," says Scott, "rushed upon it with all
the eagerness of curiosity, and rose from it with unsated appetite." I
arise with a thoroughly sated appetite from the "Mysteries of Udolpho."
The book, as Sir Walter saw, is "The Romance of the Forest" raised to a
higher power. We have a similar and similarly situated heroine, cruelly
detached from her young man, and immured in a howling wilderness of a
brigand castle in the Apennines. In place of the Marquis is a miscreant
on a larger and more ferocious scale. The usual mysteries of voices,
lights, secret passages, and innumerable doors are provided regardless of
economy. The great question, which I shall not answer, is, _what did the
Black Veil conceal_? _Not_ "the bones of Laurentina," as Catherine
Morland supposed.

Here is Emily's adventure with the veil. "She paused again, and then,
with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall--perceiving
that what it had concealed was no picture, and before she could leave the
chamber she dropped senseless on the floor. When she recovered her
recollection, . . . horror occupied her mind." Countless mysteries
coagulate around this veil, and the reader is apt to be disappointed when
the awful curtain is withdrawn. But he has enjoyed, for several hundred
pages, the pleasures of anticipation. A pedantic censor may remark that,
while the date of the story is 1580, all the virtuous people live in an
idyllic fashion, like creatures of Rousseau, existing