discovery.  The gliding forms which steal furtively along the ramparts and disappear at the end of dark passages become eventually, like the nun in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, sensible to feeling as to sight.  The unearthly music which is heard in the woods at midnight proceeds, not from the inhabitants of another sphere, but from a conscience stricken nun with a lurid past.  The corpse, which Emily believed to be that of her aunt, foully done to death by a pitiless husband, is the body of a man killed in a bandit’s affray.  Here Mrs. Radcliffe seems eager to show that she was not afraid of a corpse, but is careful that it shall not be the corpse which the reader anticipates.  She deliberately excites trembling apprehensions in order that she may show how absurd they are.  We are befooled that she may enjoy a quietly malicious triumph.  The result is that we become wary and cautious.  The genuine ghost story, read by Ludovico to revive his fainting spirits when he is keeping vigil in the “haunted” chamber, is robbed of its effect because we half expect to be disillusioned ere the close.  It is far more impressive if read as a separate story apart from its setting.  The idea of explaining away what is apparently supernatural may have occurred to Mrs. Radcliffe after reading Schiller’s popular romance, Der Geisterseher (1789), in which the elaborately contrived marvels of the Armenian, who was modelled on Cagliostro, are but the feats of a juggler and have a physical cause.  But more probably Mrs. Radcliffe’s imagination was held in check by a sensitive conscience, which would not allow her to trade on the credulity of simple-minded readers.

It is noteworthy that Mrs. Radcliffe’s last work—­The Italian, published in 1797—­is more skilfully constructed, and possesses far greater unity and concentration than The Mysteries of Udolpho.  The Inquisition scenes towards the end of the book are unduly prolonged, but the story is coherent and free from digressions.  The theme is less fanciful and far fetched than those of The Romance of the Forest and Udolpho.  It seldom strays far beyond the bounds of the probable, nor overstrains our capacity for belief.  The motive of the story is the Marchesa di Vivaldi’s opposition to her son’s marriage on account of Ellena’s obscure birth.  The Marchesa’s far reaching designs are forwarded by the ambitious monk, Schedoni, who, for his own ends, undertakes to murder Ellena. The Italian abounds in dramatic, haunting scenes.  The strangely effective overture, which describes the Confessional of the Black Penitents, the midnight watch of Vivaldi and his lively, impulsive servant, Paulo, amid the ruins of Paluzzi, the melodramatic interruption of the wedding ceremony, the meeting of Ellena and Schedoni on the lonely shore, the trial in the halls of the Inquisition, are all remarkably vivid.  The climax of the story when Schedoni, about to slay Ellena, is arrested in the very act