Brown takes very little trouble over his denouements, but his characters leave so faint an impression on our minds that we are not deeply concerned in their fates.  He is interested rather in conveying states of mind than in portraying character.  We search the windings of Clithero’s tormented conscience without realising him as an individual.  The background of rugged scenery, though it is described in vague, turgid language, is more definite and distinct than the human figures.  We feel that Brown is struggling through the obscurity of his Latinised diction to depict something he has actually seen.  An air of dreadful solemnity hangs heavily over each story.  Every being is in deadly earnest.  Brown has Godwin’s power of hypnotising us by his serious persistence, and of reducing us to a mood of awestruck gravity by the sonority of his pompous periods.

From the oppressive gloom of Brown’s “novels with a purpose,” it is a relief to turn to the irresponsible gaiety of “Geoffrey Crayon,” whose tales of terror, published some twenty years later, are usually fashioned in a jovial spirit, only faintly tinged with awe and dread.  In The Spectre Bridegroom, included in The Sketch Book (1820), the ghostly rider of Buerger’s far-famed ballad is set amid new surroundings and pleasantly turned to ridicule.  The “supernatural” wooer, who now and again arouses a genuine thrill of fear, is merely playing a practical joke on the princess by impersonating the dead bridegroom, and all ends happily.  The story of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow is set against so picturesque a background that we are almost inclined to quarrel with those who laughed and said that Ichabod Crane was still alive, and that Bram Jones, the lovely Katrina’s bridegroom, knew more of the spectre than he chose to tell.  The drowsy atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow makes us see visions and dream dreams.  The group of “Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” in Tales of a Traveller (1824) prove that Washington Irving was well versed in ghostly lore.  He, as well as any, can call spirits from the vasty deep, but, when they appear in answer to his summons, he can seldom refrain from receiving them in a jocose, irreverent mood, ill befitting the solemn, dignified spectre of a German legend.  Even the highly qualified, irrepressibly loquacious ghost of Lewis Carroll’s Phantasmagoria would have resented his genial familiarity.  The strange stories are told at a hunting-party in a country-house, a cheerful, comfortable background for ghost stories.  A hoary, one-eyed gentleman, “the whole side of whose head was dilapidated and seemed like the wing of a house shut up and haunted,” sets the ball rolling with the old story of a spectre who glides into the room, wringing her hands, and is later identified, like Scott’s Lady in the Sacque, by her resemblance to an ancestral portrait in the gallery.  The “knowing” gentleman tells of a picture that winked in a startling and alarming fashion, and