t bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke
the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral
truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in
situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle
of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night
and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends
for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her
aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not
be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned,
and will he please, therefore, send her home?

Mrs. Radcliffe's fictions are romantic, but not usually mediaeval in
subject. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho," the period of the action is the
end of the sixteenth century; in the "Romance of the Forest," 1658; in
"The Italian," about 1760. But her machinery is prevailingly Gothic and
the real hero of the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted
building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines;
in the "Romance of the Forest," a deserted abbey in the depth of the
woods; in "The Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The
moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases,
secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the
wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive
from "Otranto." So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of
desolation; the strains of mysterious music, the apparitions which glide
through the shadowy apartments, the hollow voices that warn the tyrant to
beware. But her method here is quite different from Walpole's; she tacks
a natural explanation to every unearthly sight or sound. The hollow
voices turn out to be ventriloquism; the figure of a putrefying corpse
which Emily sees behind the black curtain in the ghost chamber at Udolpho
is only a wax figure, contrived as a _memento mori_ for a former
penitent. After the reader has once learned this trick he refuses to be
imposed upon again, and, whenever he encounters a spirit, feels sure that
a future chapter will embody it back into flesh and blood.

There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of these romances.
Thackeray says that a lady of his acquaintance, an inveterate novel
reader, names Valancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth.
"'Valancourt? And wh