u have not read it? However, you
have heard that it is an attempt to blend together the most attractive
and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern
novel. . . The conduct of the story is artful and judicious; and the
characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and
elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the
mind. . . The reason is obvious; the machinery is so violent that it
destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept
within the utmost _verge_ of probability, the effect had been
preserved. . . For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance
of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but
then they must keep within certain limits of credibility. A sword so
large as to require a hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own
weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched
vault . . . when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these
circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of
imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. . . In the
course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that
it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these
defects might be avoided."

Accordingly Miss Reeve undertook to admit only a rather mild dose of the
marvelous in her romance. Like Walpole she professed to be simply the
editor of the story, which she said that she had transcribed or
translated from a manuscript in the Old English language, a now somewhat
threadbare device. The period was the fifteenth century, in the reign of
Henry VI., and the scene England. But, in spite of the implication of
its sub-title, the fiction is much less "Gothic" than its model, and its
modernness of sentiment and manners is hardly covered with even the
faintest wash of mediaevalism. As in Walpole's book, there are a murder
and a usurpation, a rightful heir defrauded of his inheritance and reared
as a peasant. There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a
ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton. The tale is
infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine
sentiment and stilted dialogue--that "old perfumed, powdered D'Arblay
conversation," as Thackeray called it--which abound in "Evelina,"
"Thaddeus of Warsaw," and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of
the last century. Still it was