r less eminent to
work for it, or customers to take off its products. The Minerva Press,
much cited but little read, had its origin in this our time; and this
time is entitled to the sole and single credit of starting and carrying
far a bastard growth of fiction, the "tale of terror," which continued
to be cultivated in its simplest form for at least half a century, and
which can hardly be said to be quite obsolete yet. But as usual we must
proceed by special names, and there is certainly no lack of them.
"Zeluco" Moore has been dealt with already; Day, the eccentric author of
_Sanford and Merton_, belongs mainly to an earlier period, and died,
still a young man, in the year of the French Revolution; but, besides,
Holcroft, Beckford, Bage, Cumberland, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis,
with Mrs. Inchbald, are distinctly "illustrations" of the time, and must
have more or less separate mention.

William Beckford is one of the problems of English literature. He was
one of the richest men in England, and his long life--1760 to 1844--was
occupied for the most part not merely with the collection, but with the
reading of books. That he could write as well as read he showed as a
mere boy by his satirical _Memoirs of Painters_, and by the
great-in-little novel of _Vathek_ (1783), respecting the composition of
which in French or English divers fables are told. Then he published
nothing for forty years, till in 1834 and 1835 he issued his _Travels in
Italy, Spain, and Portugal_, recollections of his earliest youth. These
travels have extraordinary merits of their kind; but _Vathek_ is a kind
almost to itself. The history of the Caliph, in so far as it is a satire
on unlimited power, is an eighteenth century commonplace; while many
traits in it are obviously imitated from Voltaire. But the figure of
Nouronihar, which Byron perhaps would have equalled if he could, stands
alone in literature as a fantastic projection of the potentiality of
evil magnificence in feminine character; and the closing scenes in the
domain of Eblis have the grandeur of Blake combined with that finish
which Blake's temperament, joined to his ignorance of literature and his
lack of scholarship, made it impossible for him to give. The book is
quite unique. It could hardly, in some of its weaker parts especially,
have been written at any other time; and yet its greater characteristics
have nothing to do with that time. In the florid kind of supernatural
story it h