undertook to review some of the “flitting and evanescent productions of the times.”  After a laborious inspection of the contents of a hamper full of novels, he arrived at the painful conclusion that “spirits and patience may be as completely exhausted in perusing trifles as in following algebraical calculations.”  He condemns the authors of the Gothic romance, not for their extravagance, a venial offence, but for their monotony, a deadly sin.

“We strolled through a variety of castles, each of which was regularly called Il Castello; met with as many captains of condottieri, heard various ejaculations of Santa Maria and Diabolo; read by a decaying lamp and in a tapestried chamber dozens of legends as stupid as the main history; examined such suites of deserted apartments as might set up a reasonable barrack, and saw as many glimmering lights as would make a respectable illumination.”  It was no easy task to bore Sir Walter Scott, and an excursion into the byeways of early nineteenth century fiction proves abundantly the justice of his satire.  Such novelists as Miss Sarah Wilkinson or Mrs. Eliza Parsons, whose works were greedily devoured by circulating library readers a hundred years ago, deliberately concocted an unappetising gallimaufry of earlier stories and practised the harmless deception of serving their insipid dishes under new and imposing names.  A writer in the Annual Review, so early as 1802, complains in criticising Tales of Superstition and Chivalry: 

“It is not one of the least objections against these fashionable fictions that the imagery of them is essentially monstrous.  Hollow winds, clay-cold hands, clanking chains and clicking clocks, with a few similar etcetera are continually tormenting us.”

Tales of terror were often issued in the form of sixpenny chapbooks, enlivened by woodcuts daubed in yellow, blue, red and green.  Embellished with these aids to the imagination, they were sold in thousands.  To the readers of a century ago, a “blue book” meant, as Medwin explains in his life of Shelley, not a pamphlet filled with statistics, but “a sixpenny shocker."[53] The notorious Minerva Press catered for wealthier patrons, and, it is said, sold two thousand copies of Mrs. Bennett’s Beggar Girl and her Benefactors on the day of publication, at thirty-six shillings for the seven volumes.  Samuel Rogers recalled Lane, the head of the firm, riding in a carriage and pair with two footmen, wearing gold cockades.[54] Scott was careful not to disclose the names of the novelists he derided, but his hamper probably contained a selection of Mrs. Parsons’ sixty works, and perhaps two of Miss Wilkinson’s, with their alluring titles, The Priory of St. Clair, or The Spectre of the Murdered Nun; The Convent of the Grey Penitents, or The Apostate Nun.  Perchance, he found there Mrs. Henrietta Rouviere’s romance, (published in the same year as Montorio,) A Peep at our Ancestors (1807), describing the reign of King Stephen.  Mrs. Rouviere, in her preface,