for his friend, Conrad, who had disappeared
in suspicious circumstances, hears from the Knights Templars,
that the wicked Constable is believed to hold two lovers in a
profound and deathlike sleep. He resolves to make an attempt to
draw from its sheath the sword which separates them and so
restore them to life and liberty. Undismayed by the fate of those
who have fallen in the quest, Sir Egbert enters the castle, where
he is entertained at a gorgeous feast. When the festivities are
at their height, and Sir Egbert has momentarily forgotten his
enterprise, a terrible shriek is heard. The revellers vanish, and
Sir Egbert is left alone to face a spectral corpse, which beckons
him onward to a vault, where in flaming characters are inscribed
the words: "Death to him who violates the mysteries of Gundulph's
Tower." Nothing daunted, Sir Egbert amid execrations of fiends,
encounters delusive horrors and at last unsheathes the sword. The
lovers awake, and the whole apparatus of enchantment vanishes.
Conrad tells how he and Bertha, six years before, had been lured
by a wandering fire to a luxurious cavern, where they drank a
magic potion. The story closes with the marriage of Conrad and
Bertha, and of Egbert and Matilda, a sister of one of the other
victims of the same enchanter.

In Dr. Drake's stories are patiently collected all the heirlooms
necessary for the full equipment of a Gothic castle. Massive
doors, which sway ponderously on their hinges or are forcibly
burst open and which invariably close with a resounding crash,
dark, eerie galleries, broken staircases, decayed apartments,
mouldering floors, tolling bells, skeletons, corpses, howling
spectres--all are there; but the possessor, overwhelmed by the
very profusion which surrounds him, is at a loss how to make use
of them. He does not realise the true significance of a
half-stifled groan or an unearthly yell heard in the darkness.
Each new horror indeed seems but to put new life into the heart
of the redoubtable Sir Egbert, who, like Spenser's gallant
knights, advances from triumph to triumph vanquishing evil at
every step. It is impossible to become absorbed in his
personages, who have less body than his spectres, and whose
adventures take the form of a walk through an exhibition of
horrors, mechanically set in motion to prove their prowess. Dr.
Drake seems happier when the hideous beings are put to rout, and
the transformation-scene, which places fairyland before us