Among the direct progeny of these grandiose villains are to be included those of Lewis and Maturin, and the heroes of Scott and Byron.  We know them by their world-weariness, as well as by their piercing eyes and passion-marked faces, their “verra wrinkles Gothic.”  In The Giaour we are told: 

  “Dark and unearthly is the scowl
  That glares beneath his dusky cowl: 

  “The flash of that dilating eye
  Reveals too much of times gone by. 
  Though varying, indistinct its hue
  Oft will his glance the gazer rue.”

Of the Corsair, it is said: 

  “There breathe but few whose aspect might defy
  The full encounter of his searching eye.”

Lara is drawn from the same model: 

  “That brow in furrowed lines had fixed at last
  And spoke of passions, but of passions past;
  The pride but not the fire of early days,
  Coldness of mien, and carelessness of praise;
  A high demeanour and a glance that took
  Their thoughts from others by a single look.”

The feminine counterpart of these bold impersonations of evil is the tyrannical abbess who plays a part in The Romance of the Forest and in The Italian, and who was adopted and exaggerated by Lewis, but her crimes are petty and malicious, not daring and ambitious, like the schemes of Montoni and Schedoni.

One of Mrs. Radcliffe’s contemporaries is said to have suggested that if she wished to transcend the horror of the Inquisition scenes in The Italian she would have to visit hell itself.  Like her own heroines, Mrs. Radcliffe had too elegant and refined an imagination and too fearful a heart to undertake so desperate a journey.  She would have recoiled with horror from the impious suggestion.  In Gaston de Blondeville, written in 1802, but published posthumously with a memoir by Noon Talfourd, she ventures to make one or two startling innovations.  Her hero is no longer a pale, romantic young man of gentle birth, but a stolid, worthy merchant.  Here, at last, she indulges in a substantial spectre, who cannot be explained away as the figment of a disordered imagination, since he seriously alarms, not a solitary heroine or a scared lady’s-maid, but Henry III. himself and his assembled barons.  Yet apart from this daring escapade, it is timidity rather than the spirit of valorous enterprise that is urging Mrs. Radcliffe into new and untried paths.  Her happy, courageous disregard for historical accuracy in describing far-off scenes and bygone ages has deserted her.  She searches painfully in ancient records, instead of in her imagination, for mediaeval atmosphere.  Her story is grievously overburdened with elaborate descriptions of customs and ceremonies, and she adds laborious notes, citing passages from learned authorities, such as Leland’s Collectanea, Pegge’s dissertation on the