his oath, and soon becomes almost demented.  The news of his sister’s marriage seems to rouse him momentarily from his lethargy, and when he discovers that Ruthven is to be the bridegroom he urges her to delay the marriage.  His warnings are disregarded, and the ceremony takes place.  Aubrey relates to his sister’s guardians all that he knows of Ruthven, but it is too late.  Ruthven has disappeared, and she has “glutted the thirst of a vampyre.”

Polidori’s manner of telling the story is curiously matter of fact and restrained.  He relates the incidents as they occur, and leaves the reader to form his own conclusions.  If Lewis had been handling the theme he would have wallowed in gory details, and would have expatiated on the agonies of his victims.  Polidori wisely keeps his story in a quiet key, depending for his effect on the terror of the bare facts.  He realises that he is on the verge of the unspeakable.

Polidori’s story set a fashion in vampires, who appear as characters in fiction all through the nineteenth century.  A writer in the Dublin University Magazine tells of a vampire who plays an admirable game of whist!  There is an “explained” vampire in one of George Macdonald’s stories, Adela Cathcart.  The prince of vampires is, however, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, round whom centres a story of absorbing interest.

De Quincey, who might have selected from the novel of terror many admirable illustrations for his essay on Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts, and who seems to have been attracted by the German type of horrific story, shows some facility in sensational fiction.  In Klosterheim, a one-volumed novel published in 1832, the interest circles round the machinations of an elusive, ubiquitous “Masque,” eventually revealed to be none other than the son of the late Landgrave, who, like many a man before him in the tale of terror, has been done to death by a usurper.  Disappearances through trap-doors, and escapes down subterranean passages are effected with a dexterity suggestive of Mrs. Radcliffe’s methods; and the inexplicable murders, with the exception of that of an aged seneschal accidentally betrayed, are not real.  In certain of his moods and habits, the Masque bears a likeness to Lewis’s “Bravo,” but the setting of De Quincey’s story is very different.  The adventures of the Masque and of the Lady Pauline are cast in Germany amid the confusion of the Thirty Years’ War.  In The Household Wreck, published in Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1838, De Quincey shows his power of conveying a sense of foreboding, that anticipation of horror which is often more harrowing than the reality.  Another tale of terror, The Avenger, published in the same year, describes a series of bloodcurdling murders which baffle the skill of the police, but which eventually prove to have been committed by a son to avenge dishonour done to his Jewish mother.  For a collection of Popular Tales and Romances