obsolete office of Esquire of the King’s Body, Sir George Bulke’s account of the coronation of Richard III., Mador’s History of the Exchequer, etc.  We are transported from the eighteenth century, not actually to mediaeval England, but to a carefully arranged pageant displaying mediaeval costumes, tournaments and banquets.  The actors speak in antique language to accord with the picturesque background against which they stand. Gaston de Blondeville, which is noteworthy as an early attempt to shadow forth the days of chivalry, has far more colour than Leland’s Longsword (1752), Miss Reeve’s Old English Baron (1777), or Miss Sophia Lee’s Recess (1785), from which rather than from Mrs. Radcliffe’s earlier romances its descent may be traced.  The attempt to avoid glaring anachronisms and to reproduce an accurate picture of a former age points forward to Scott.  Strutt’s Queenhoo Hall, which Scott completed, was a revolt against the unscrupulous inventions of romance-writers, and was crammed full of archaeological lore.  The story of Gaston de Blondeville is tedious, the characters are shadowy and unreal, and we become, as the Ettric Shepherd remarked, in Noctes Ambrosianae, “somewhat too hand and glove with his ghostship”; yet, regarded simply as a spectacular effect, it is not without indications of skill and power.  Miss Mitford based a drama on it, but it never attained the popularity of Mrs. Radcliffe’s other novels.  It was published when her reputation was on the wane.

Of the materials on which Mrs. Radcliffe drew in fashioning her romances it is impossible to speak with any certainty.  Doubtless she had studied certain old chronicles, and she was deeply read in Shakespeare, especially in the tragedies.  Much of her leisure, we are told, was spent in reading the literary productions of the day, especially poetry and novels.  At the head of her chapters she often quotes Milton as well as the poets of her own century—­Mason, Gray, Collins, and once “Ossian”—­choosing almost inevitably passages which deal with the terrible or the ghostly.  She must have known The Castle of Otranto, and in The Italian she quotes several passages from Walpole’s melodrama The Mysterious Mother.  But often she may have been dependent on the oral legends clustering round ancient abbeys for the background of her stories.  Ghostly legends would always appeal to her, and she probably amassed a hoard of traditions when she visited English castles during her tours with her husband.  The background of Gaston de Blondeville is Kenilworth Castle.  That ancient ruins stirred her imagination profoundly is clear from passages in her notes on the journeys.  In Furness Abbey she sees in her mind’s eye “a midnight procession of monks,” and at Brougham Castle: 

“One almost saw the surly keeper descending through this door-case and heard him rattle the keys of the chamber above, listening with indifference to the clank of chains and to the echo of that groan below which seemed to rend the heart it burst from,”

or again: