r writing was done to amuse her
loneliness in the still hours of evening; and the wildness of her
imagination, and the romantic love of night and solitude which pervades
her books, are sometimes accounted for in this way. In 1809 it was
currently reported and believed that Mrs. Radcliffe was dead. Another
form of the rumor was that she had been insane by continually poring over
visions of horror and mystery. Neither report was true; she lived till
1823, in full possession of her faculties, although she published nothing
after 1797. The circulation of such stories shows how retired, and even
obscure, a life this very popular writer contrived to lead.

It would be tedious to give here an analysis of these once famous
fictions _seriatim_.[19] They were very long, very much alike, and very
much overloaded with sentiment and description. The plots were
complicated and abounded in the wildest improbabilities and in those
incidents which were once the commonplaces of romantic fiction and which
realism has now turned out of doors: concealments, assassinations, duels,
disguises, kidnappings, escapes, elopements, intrigues, forged documents,
discoveries of old crimes, and identifications of lost heirs. The
characters, too, were of the conventional kind. There were dark-browed,
crime-stained villains--forerunners, perhaps of Manfred and Lara, for the
critics think that Mrs. Radcliffe's stories were not without important
influence on Byron.[20] There were high-born, penitent dames who retired
to convents in expiation of sins which are not explained until the
general raveling of clews in the final chapter. There were bravoes,
banditti, feudal tyrants, monks, inquisitors, soubrettes, and simple
domestics _a la_ Bianca, in Walpole's romance. The lover was of the type
adored by our great-grandmothers, handsome, melancholy, passionate,
respectful but desperate, a user of most choice English; with large black
eyes, smooth white forehead, and jetty curls, now sunk, Mr. Perry says,
to the covers of prune boxes. The heroine, too, was sensitive and
melancholy. When alone upon the seashore or in the mountains, at sunset
or twilight, or under the midnight moon, or when the wind is blowing, she
overflows into stanza or sonnet, "To Autumn," "To Sunset," "To the Bat,"
"To the Nightingale," "To the Winds," "To Melancholy," "Song of the
Evening Hour." We have heard this pensive music drawing near in the
strains of the Miltonic school,