supernatural remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe’s method, and Mrs. Shelley shows keen psychological insight in her delineation of the state of mind which readily conjures up imaginary terrors.  When Lionel Verney is left alone in the universe, her power seems to flag, and instead of the final crescendo of horror, which we expect at the end of the book, we are left with an ineffective picture of the last man in Rome in 2005 deciding to explore the countries he has not yet viewed.  As he wanders amid the ruins he recalls not only “the buried Caesars,” but also the monk in The Italian, of whom he had read in childhood—­a striking proof of Mrs. Shelley’s faith in the permanence of Mrs. Radcliffe’s fame.

Though the style of The Last Man is often tediously prolix and is disfigured by patches of florid rhetoric and by inappropriate similes scattered broadcast, occasional passages of wonderful beauty recall Shelley’s imagery; and, in conveying the pathos of loneliness, personal feeling lends nobility and eloquence to her style.  With so ambitious a subject, it was natural that she should only partially succeed in carrying her readers with her.  Though there are oases, the story is a somewhat tedious and dreary stretch of narrative that can only be traversed with considerable effort.

Mrs. Shelley’s later works—­Perkin Warbeck (1830), a historical novel; Lodore (1835), which describes the early life of Shelley and Harriet; Falkner (1837), which was influenced by Caleb Williams—­do not belong to the history of the novel of terror; but some of her short tales, contributed to periodicals and collected in 1891, have gruesome and supernatural themes. A Tale of the Passions, or the Death of Despina[123] a story based on the struggles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, contains a perfect specimen of the traditional villain of the novel of terror: 

“Every feature of his countenance spoke of the struggle of passions and the terrible egotism of one who would sacrifice himself to the establishment of his will:  his black eyebrows were scattered, his grey eyes deep-set and scowling, his look at once stern and haggard.  A smile seemed never to have disturbed the settled scorn which his lips expressed; his high forehead was marked by a thousand contradictory lines.”

This terrific personage spends the last years of his life in orthodox fashion as an austere saint in a monastery.

The Mortal Immortal, a variation on the theme of St. Leon, is the record of a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, who drank half of the elixir his master had compounded in the belief that it was a potion to destroy love.  It is written on his three hundred and twenty-third birthday. Transformation, like Frankenstein, dwells on the pathos of ugliness and deformity, but the subject is treated rather in the spirit of an eastern fairy tale than in that of a novel of terror.  The dwarf, in return for a chest of treasure, borrows a beautiful body, and, thus disguised, wins the love of Juliet, and all ends happily.  Mrs. Shelley’s short stories[124] reveal a stronger sense of proportion than her novels, and are written in a more graceful, fluent style than the books on which she expended great labour.