d by the idea of
the misery his deed will arouse in her mind, he attempts, in a
moment of frenzy, to slay her. Believing that Mrs. Lorimer has
died after hearing of the murder, Clithero flees to America. When
he disappears from his home, Huntly resolves to follow him, and
in his search loses himself amid wild and desolate country. He is
attacked by Indians, and after frightful adventures at length
reaches his home. Clithero, whom he believed dead, has been
rescued. Mrs. Lorimer is still alive, and is married to a former
lover. This news, however, fails to restore Clithero, who, in a
fit of insanity, flings himself overboard when he is in a ship in
charge of Huntly.

Brown's plots, which often open well, are spoilt by hasty,
careless conclusions. It was his habit to write two or three
novels simultaneously. He was beset by the problem that exercised
even Scott's brain: "The devil of a difficulty is that one
puzzles the skein in order to excite curiosity, and then cannot
disentangle it for the satisfaction of the prying fiend they have
raised."

Brown takes very little trouble over his denouements, but his
characters leave so faint an impression on our minds that we are
not deeply concerned in their fates. He is interested rather in
conveying states of mind than in portraying character. We search
the windings of Clithero's tormented conscience without realising
him as an individual. The background of rugged scenery, though it
is described in vague, turgid language, is more definite and
distinct than the human figures. We feel that Brown is struggling
through the obscurity of his Latinised diction to depict
something he has actually seen. An air of dreadful solemnity
hangs heavily over each story. Every being is in deadly earnest.
Brown has Godwin's power of hypnotising us by his serious
persistence, and of reducing us to a mood of awestruck gravity by
the sonority of his pompous periods.

From the oppressive gloom of Brown's "novels with a purpose," it
is a relief to turn to the irresponsible gaiety of "Geoffrey
Crayon," whose tales of terror, published some twenty years
later, are usually fashioned in a jovial spirit, only faintly
tinged with awe and dread. In _The Spectre Bridegroom_, included
in _The Sketch Book_ (1820), the ghostly rider of Buerger's
far-famed ballad is set amid new surroundings and pleasantly
turned to ridicule. The "supernatural" wooer, who now and again
arouses a genuine thrill of fear, is m