the forest, ranges of deserted apartments where the moon looks in
through mullioned casements, ruinous turrets around which the night winds
moan and howl. Here, too, once more are the wicked uncle who seizes upon
the estates of his deceased brother's wife, and keeps her and her
daughter shut up in his dungeon for the somewhat long period of eighteen
years; the heroine who touches her lute and sings in pensive mood, till
the notes steal to the ear of the young earl imprisoned in the adjacent
tower; the maiden who is carried off on horseback by bandits, till her
shrieks bring ready aid; the peasant lad who turns out to be the baron's
heir. "His surprise was great when the baroness, reviving, fixed her
eyes mournfully upon him and asked him to uncover his arm." Alas! the
surprise is not shared by the reader, when "'I have indeed found my
long-lost child: that strawberry,'"[27] etc., etc. "Gaston de
Blondville" has a ghost--not explained away in the end according to Mrs.
Radcliffe's custom. It is the spirit of Reginald de Folville, Knight
Hospitaller of St. John, murdered in the Forest of Arden by Gaston de
Blondville and the prior of St. Mary's. He is a most robust apparition,
and is by no means content with revisiting the glimpses of the moon, but
goes in and out at all hours of the day, and so often as to become
somewhat of a bore. He ultimately destroys both first and second
murderer: one in his cell, the other in open tournament, where his
exploits as a mysterious knight in black armor may have given Scott a
hint for his black knight at the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in "Ivanhoe"
(1819). His final appearance is in the chamber of the king, with whom he
holds quite a long conversation. "The worm is my sister," he says: "the
mist of death is on me. My bed is in darkness. The prisoner is
innocent. The prior of St. Mary's is gone to his account. Be warned."
It is not explained why Mrs. Radcliffe refrained from publishing this
last romance of hers. Perhaps she recognized that it was belated and
that the time for that sort of thing had gone by. By 1802 Lewis' "Monk"
was in print, as well as several translations from German romances;
Scott's early ballads were out, and Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." That
very year saw the publication of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border."
By 1826 the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of the Gothic
type hopelessly obsolete. In 1834 two volumes of her poems were g