ll, and, guided by a glimmering light, finds "an antique
mansion" with turrets at the corners. As he approaches the porch,
the light glides away. All is dark and still. The light reappears
and the bell tolls. As Sir Bertrand enters the castle, the door
closes behind him. A bluish flame leads him up a staircase till
he comes to a wide gallery and a second staircase, where the
light vanishes. He grasps a dead-cold hand which he severs from
the wrist with his sword. The blue flame now leads him to a
vault, where he sees the owner of the hand "completely armed,
thrusting forwards the bloody stump of an arm, with a terrible
frown and menacing gesture and brandishing a sword in the
remaining hand." When attacked, the figure vanishes, leaving
behind a massive, iron key which unlocks a door leading to an
apartment containing a coffin, and statues of black marble,
attired in Moorish costume, holding enormous sabres in their
right hands. As the knight enters, each of them rears an arm and
advances a leg and at the same moment the lid of the coffin opens
and the bell tolls. Sir Bertrand, guided by the flames,
approaches the coffin from which a lady in a shroud and a black
veil arises. When he kisses her, the whole building falls asunder
with a crash. Sir Bertrand is thrown into a trance and awakes in
a gorgeous room, where he sees a beautiful lady who thanks him as
her deliverer. At a banquet, nymphs place a laurel wreath on his
head, but as the lady is about to address him the fragment breaks
off.

The architecture of the castle, with its gallery, staircase and
subterranean vaults, closely resembles that of Walpole's Gothic
structure. The "enormous sabres" too are familiar to readers of
_The Castle of Otranto_. The gliding light, disquieting at the
outset of the story but before the close familiar grown, is
doomed to be the guide of many a distressed wanderer through the
Gothic labyrinths of later romances. Mrs. Barbauld chose her
properties with admirable discretion, but lacked the art to use
them cunningly. A tolling bell, heard in the silence and darkness
of a lonely moor, will quicken the beatings of the heart, but
employed as a prompter's signal to herald the advance of a group
of black statues is only absurd. After the grimly suggestive
opening, the story gradually loses in power as it proceeds and
the happy ending, which wings our thoughts back to the Sleeping
Beauty of childhood, is wholly incongruous. If the fragment