ask, "Can this be Scott?" But we are soon
disabused, for the romance, in spite of the words of the advertisement,
is very little historical, and the fashion of it is thinly wordy and
sentimental. The hero is the son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, but his
speech is Grandisonian. The adventures are of the usual kind: the
_dramatis personae_ include gallant knights who go a-tilting with their
ladies' gloves upon their casques, usurpers, villains, pirates, a wicked
monk who tries to poison the hero, an oppressed countess, a distressed
damsel disguised as a page, a hermit who has a cave in a mountain side,
etc. The Gothic properties are few; though the frontispiece to the first
volume represents a cowled monk raising from the ground the figure of a
swooning knight in complete armor, in front of an abbey church with an
image of the Virgin and Child sculptured in a niche above the door; and
the building is thus described in the text: "Its windows crowded with the
foliage of their ornaments, and dimmed by the hand of the painter; its
numerous spires towering above the roof, and the Christian ensign on its
front, declared it a residence of devotion and charity." An episode in
the story narrates the death of a father by the hand of his son in the
Barons' War of Henry III. But no farther advantage is taken of the
historic background afforded by this civil conflict, nor is Simon de
Montfort so much as named in the whole course of the book.

Clara Reeve was the daughter of a clergyman. She lived and died at
Ipswich (1725-1803). Walter Scott contributed a memoir of her to
"Ballantyne's Novelists' Library," in which he defended Walpole's frank
use of the supernatural against her criticisms, quoted above, and gave
the preference to Walpole's method.[17] She acknowledged that her
romance was a "literary descendant of 'Otranto';" but the author of the
latter, evidently nettled by her strictures, described "The Old English
Baron," as "Otranto reduced to reason and probability," and declared that
any murder trial at the Old Bailey would have made a more interesting
story. Such as it is, it bridges the interval between its model and the
novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis' "Monk" (1795), and Maturin's "Fatal
Revenge, or the Family of Montorio" (1807).[18]

Anne Radcliffe--born Ward in 1764, the year of "Otranto"--was the wife of
an editor, who was necessarily absent from home much of the time until
late at night. A large part of he