accuracy, but evolved most of her descriptions, not from original sources in ancient documents, but from her own inner consciousness.  It was only in her last novel—­Gaston de Blondeville—­that she made use of old chronicles.  Within the Scottish castle we meet a heroine with an “expression of pensive melancholy” and a “smile softly clouded with sorrow,” a noble lord deprived of his rights by a villain “whose life is marked with vice and whose death with the bitterness of remorse.”  But these grey and ghostly shadows, who flit faintly through our imagination, are less prophetic of coming events than the properties with which the castle is endowed, a secret but accidently discovered panel, a trap-door, subterranean vaults, an unburied corpse, a suddenly extinguished lamp and a soft-toned lute—­a goodly heritage from The Castle of Otranto.  The situations which a villain of Baron Malcolm’s type will inevitably create are dimly shadowed forth and involve, ere the close, the hairbreadth rescue of a distressed maiden, the reinstatement of the lord in his rights, and the identification of the long-lost heir by the convenient and time-honoured “strawberry mark.”  These promising materials are handled in a childish fashion.  The faintly pencilled outlines, the characterless figures, the nerveless structure, give little presage of the boldly effective scenery, the strong delineations and the dexterously managed plots of the later novels.  The gradual, steady advance in skill and power is one of the most interesting features of Mrs. Radcliffe’s work.  Few could have guessed from the slight sketch of Baron Malcolm, a merely slavish copy of the traditional villain, that he was to be the ancestor of such picturesque and romantic creatures as Montoni and Schedoni.

This tentative beginning was quickly followed by the more ambitious Sicilian Romance (1790), in which we are transported to the palace of Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini, on the north coast of Sicily.  This time the date is fixed officially at 1580.  The Marquis has one son and two daughters, the children of his first wife, who has been supplanted by a beautiful but unscrupulous successor.  The first wife is reputed dead, but is, in reality, artfully and maliciously concealed in an uninhabited wing of the abbey.  It is her presence which leads to disquieting rumours of the supernatural.  Ferdinand, the son, vainly tries to solve the enigma of certain lights, which wander elusively about the deserted wing, and finds himself perilously suspended, like David Balfour in Kidnapped, on a decayed staircase, of which the lower half has broken away.  In this hazardous situation, Ferdinand accidentally drops his lamp and is left in total darkness.  An hour later he is rescued by the ladies of the castle, who, alarmed by his long absence, boldly come in search of him with a light.  During another tour of exploration he hears a hollow groan, which, he is told, proceeds