le, and a creaking door,
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains--a galley--a light--
Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
And there's a novel."

In _The Story-Teller_, a magazine which reprinted many popular
tales, we find German legends like _The Three Students of
Goettingen_, a "True Story Very Strange and Very Pitiful"; _The
Wood Demon; The Wehr-Wolf; The Sexton of Cologne, or Lucifer_, a
striking story of an Italian artist who was haunted by a terrible
figure he had painted in the church at Arezzo. Yet the first tale
in the collection, _The Story-Haunted_, which describes the sad
fate of a youth brought up in a solitary library reading romances
to his mother, was intended, like _The Spectre-Smitten_, in
_Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician_,[128] as a solemn
warning against over-indulgence in fictitious terrors. The mother
dies in an agony of horror, as her son reads aloud the account of
the Gentleman of Florence, who was pursued by a spectre of
himself, which vanished with him finally into the earth, as the
priest endeavoured to bless him. The son, left alone, enters the
world, and judges the people around him by the standard of books.
The story-haunted youth falls in love with the phantom of his own
imagination, whom he endows with all the graces of the heroines
of romance. He finds her embodied at last, but she dies before
they are united. _The Romancist and Novelist's Library_, in ten
volumes, contains a comprehensive selection of tales of terror by
the "best authors." Walpole, Miss Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk"
Lewis, Maturin, Mrs. Shelley, and Charles Brockden Brown are all
represented; and there are many translations of tales by French
and German authors. We may take our choice of _The Spectre
Barber_ or _The Spectre Bride_, or, if we are inclined to
incredulity, see _The Spectre Unmasked_. The entertainment
offered is of bewildering variety. Some of the stories, such as
D.F. Hayne's _Romance of the Castle_, seem like familiar,
well-tried friends, and conceal no surprises for the readers of
Gothic romance. Others, like _The Sleepless Woman_, by W. Jerdan,
are more piquant. The hero is warned by his dying uncle to beware
of women's bright eyes. In spite of this he marries a lady, whose
eyes unite the qualities of the robin and the falcon. After the
wedding he makes the awful discovery that she is of too noble a
lineage ever to sleep. Turn where he may, her eyes are always
upon him. At