to be invaded with an awful horror that gradually prevailed over all the consolations of reason and philosophy; nor was his heart free from the terrors of assassination.  In order to dissipate these agreeable reveries, he had recourse to the conversation of his guide, by whom he was entertained with the history of divers travellers who had been robbed and murdered by ruffians, whose retreat was in the recesses of that very wood."[27]

The sighing of the trees, thunder and sudden flashes of lightning add to the horror of a journey, which resembles Mrs. Radcliffe’s description of Emily’s approach to Udolpho.  When Count Fathom takes refuge in a robber’s hut, he discovers in his room, which has no bolt on the inside of the door, the body of a recently murdered man, concealed beneath some bundles of straw.  Effecting his escape by placing the corpse in his own bed to deceive the robbers, the count is mistaken for a phantom by the old woman who waits upon him.  In carrying out his designs upon Celinda, the count aggravates her natural timidity by relating dismal stories of omens and apparitions, and then groans piteously outside her door and causes the mysterious music of an AEolian harp to sound upon the midnight air.  Celinda sleeps, too, like the ill-starred heroine of the novel of terror, “at the end of a long gallery, scarce within hearing of any other inhabited part of the house."[28] The scene in Count Fathom, in which Renaldo, at midnight, visits, as he thinks, the tomb of Monimia, is surrounded with circumstances of gloom and mystery: 

“The uncommon darkness of the night, the solemn silence and lonely situation of the place, conspired with the occasion of his coming and the dismal images of his fancy, to produce a real rapture of gloomy expectation...  The clock struck twelve, the owl screeched from the ruined battlement, the door was opened by the sexton, who, by the light of a glimmering taper, conducted the despairing lover to a dreary aisle.”

As he watches again on a second night: 

“His ear was suddenly invaded with the sound of some few, solemn notes, issuing from the organ which seemed to feel the impulse of an invisible hand ... reason shrunk before the thronging ideas of his fancy, which represented this music as the prelude to something strange and supernatural."[29]

The figure of a woman, arrayed in a flowing robe and veil, approaches—­and proves to be Monimia in the flesh.  Although Smollett precedes Walpole, in point of time, he is, in these scenes, nearer in spirit to Udolpho than Otranto.  His use of terror, however, is merely incidental; he strays inadvertently into the history of Gothic romance.  The suspicions and forebodings, with which Smollett plays occasionally upon the nerves of his readers, become part of the ordinary routine in the tale of terror.