onvention, we incline to insist more firmly that the pill at
least be sugar-coated,--if indeed we submit to physic at all.

There was also a tendency during the second half of the
eighteenth century--very likely only half serious and hardly
more than a literary fad--toward the romance of mystery and
horror. Horace Walpole, the last man on earth from whom one
would expect the romantic and sentimental, produced in his
"Castle of Otranto" such a book; and Mrs. Radcliffe's "The
Mystery of Udolpho" (standing for numerous others) manipulated
the stage machinery of this pseudo-romantic revival and
reaction; moonlit castles, medieval accessories, weird sounds
and lights at the dread midnight hour,--an attack upon the
reader's nerves rather than his sensibilities, much the sort of
paraphernalia employed with a more spiritual purpose and effect
in our own day by the dramatist, Maeterlinck. Beckford's
"Vathek" and Lewis' "The Monk" are variations upon this theme,
which for a while was very popular and is decidedly to be seen
in the work of the first novelist upon American soil, Charles
Brockden Brown, whose somber "Wieland," read with the Radcliffe
school in mind, will reveal its probable parentage. We have seen
how the movement was happily satirized by its natural enemy,
Jane Austen. Few more enjoyable things can be quoted than this
conversation from "Northanger Abbey" between two typical young
ladies of the time:--

'But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with
yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?'

'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am
got to the black veil.'

'Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you
what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not
wild to know?'

'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me; I
would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a
skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am
delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole
life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to
meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the
world.'

'Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you
have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together;
and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the
same kind for you.'

'Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all