immediately explains away this phenomenon by the presence of a thief who has cut a spy-hole in the canvas. The Bold Dragoon is a spirited, riotous nightmare in which the furniture dances to the music of the bellows played by an uncanny musician in a long flannel gown and a nightcap.  The Story of the German Student is in a different key.  Here Irving strikes a note of real horror.  The student falls in love with an imaginary lady, woven out of his dreams.  He finds her in distress one night in the streets of Paris, takes her home, only to find her a corpse in the morning.  A police-officer informs him that the lady was guillotined the day before, and the student discovers the truth of this statement when he unrolls a bandage and her head falls to the floor.  The young man loses his reason, and is tormented by the belief that an evil spirit has reanimated a dead body to ensnare him.  The morning after the recital of this gruesome story, the host reads aloud to his guests a manuscript entrusted to him, together with a portrait, by a young Italian.  This youth, it chances, learnt painting with a monk, who, as a penance, drew pictures, or modelled waxen images, representing death and corruption, a detail which reminds us of what was concealed by the Black Veil in Udolpho.  He later falls in love with his model, Bianca, who, during his absence abroad, marries his friend Filippo.  In a jealous rage the young Italian slays his rival, and is unceasingly haunted by his phantom.  Washington Irving has no desire to endure for long the atmosphere of mystery and horror his story has created, and quickly relieves the tension by a return to ordinary life.  The host promises to show the picture, which is said to affect all beholders in an extraordinary fashion, to each of his guests in turn.  They all profess themselves remarkably affected by it, until the host confesses that he has too sincere a regard for the feelings of the young Italian to reveal the actual picture to any of them; With this moment of disillusionment the strange stories come to an end.  The title, Tales of a Traveller, under which Irving placed his tales of terror, indicates the mood in which he fashioned them.  He regarded them much as he would regard the wonderful adventures of Baron Munchausen.  They were to be taken, like one of Dr. Marigold’s prescriptions, with a grain of salt.  The idea of blending levity with horror, suggested perhaps by German influence, was very popular in England and France at this period.  Balzac’s L’Auberge Rouge and L’Elixir de la Longue Vie are written in a similar mood.

It is not always the boldest and most adventurous beings who elect to dwell amid “calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire.”  The “virtuous mind,” whom supernatural horrors may “startle well but not astound,” sometimes finds a melancholy pleasure in beguiling weaker mortals into haunted ruins to watch their firm nerves tremble.  Sometimes too, though a man be wholly innocent of the desire