Like the Story-Teller, The Romancist and Novelist’s Library should be read

  “At night when doors are shut,
  And the wood-worm pricks,
  And the death-watch ticks,
  And the bar has a flag of smut,—­
  And the cat’s in the water-butt—­
  And the socket floats and flares,
  And the housebeams groan,
  And a foot unknown
  Is surmised on the garret stairs,
  And the locks slip unawares.”

But “tales of terror” lose some of their power when read one after another; they are most effective read singly in periodicals. Blackwood’s Magazine was especially famous for its tales, the best of which have been collected and published separately.  The editor of the Dublin University Magazine shows a marked preference for tales of a supernatural or sensational cast.  Le Fanu, who claimed that his stories, like those of Sir Walter Scott, belonged to the “legitimate school of English tragic romance,” was one of the best-known contributors. All the Year Round and Household Words, under the editorship of Dickens, often found room for the occult and the uncanny.  Wilkie Collins’ fascinating serial, The Moonstone, was published in All the Year Round in 1868; The Woman in White had appeared six years earlier in Blackwood.  The stories included in these magazines are of various types.  The old-fashioned spook gradually declines in popularity.  He is ousted in a scientific age by more recondite forms of terror.  Before 1875, with a few belated exceptions: 

  “Ghosts, wandering here and there
  Troop home to churchyards, damned spirits all,
  That in crossways and floods have burial,
  Already to their wormy beds are gone.”

The “explained supernatural” is skilfully improved and developed.  Le Fanu’s Green Tea is a story from the diary of a German doctor, concerning a patient who was dogged by a black monkey.  The creature, “whose green eyes glow with an expression of unfathomable malignity,” is medically explained to be an illusion; but it is so vividly presented that it fastens on our imagination with remarkable tenacity.  Wilkie Collins’ short story, The Yellow Mask, included in the series called After Dark, is another experiment in the same kind.  A jealous woman appears among the dancers at a ball, wearing a waxen cast of the face of the man’s dead wife.  The short story, in which the author deliberately shakes our nerves and then soothes away our fears by accounting naturally for startling phenomena, is an amazingly popular type.  It reappears continually in different guises.  Occasionally it merges into pleasant buffoonery. Die Geistertodtenglocke, for instance, a story in the Dublin University Magazine (1862), is a burlesque, in which the mysterious tolling of a bell is explained by the discovery that a cow strolled into the ruin to eat the hay with which the rope was mended.  But, judiciously handled, this type of story makes a strong appeal to human beings who like to know how much of the terrible and painful they can endure, and who yet must ultimately be reassured.