. _A Tale
of the Passions, or the Death of Despina_[123] a story based on
the struggles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, contains a
perfect specimen of the traditional villain of the novel of
terror:

"Every feature of his countenance spoke of the struggle
of passions and the terrible egotism of one who would
sacrifice himself to the establishment of his will: his
black eyebrows were scattered, his grey eyes deep-set
and scowling, his look at once stern and haggard. A
smile seemed never to have disturbed the settled scorn
which his lips expressed; his high forehead was marked
by a thousand contradictory lines."

This terrific personage spends the last years of his life in
orthodox fashion as an austere saint in a monastery.

_The Mortal Immortal_, a variation on the theme of _St. Leon_, is
the record of a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, who drank half of the
elixir his master had compounded in the belief that it was a
potion to destroy love. It is written on his three hundred and
twenty-third birthday. _Transformation_, like _Frankenstein_,
dwells on the pathos of ugliness and deformity, but the subject
is treated rather in the spirit of an eastern fairy tale than in
that of a novel of terror. The dwarf, in return for a chest of
treasure, borrows a beautiful body, and, thus disguised, wins the
love of Juliet, and all ends happily. Mrs. Shelley's short
stories[124] reveal a stronger sense of proportion than her
novels, and are written in a more graceful, fluent style than the
books on which she expended great labour.

The literary history of Byron's fragmentary novel and of
Polidori's short story, _The Vampyre_, is somewhat tangled, but
the solution is to be found in the diary of Dr. John William
Polidori, edited and elucidated by William Michael Rossetti. The
day after that on which Polidori states that all the competitors,
except himself, had begun their stories, he records the simple
fact: "Began my ghost-story after tea." He gives no hint as to
the subject of his tale, but Mrs. Shelley tells us that Polidori
had some idea of a "skull-headed lady, who was so punished for
looking through a key-hole, and who was finally buried in the
tomb of the Capulets." In the introduction to _Ernestus
Berchtold, or the Modern OEdipus_, he states definitely:

"The tale here presented to the public is one I began
at Coligny, when _Frankenstein_ was planned, and when a
nob