“flatters herself that, aided by records and documents, she may have succeeded in a correct though faint sketch of the times she treats, and in affording, if through a dim yet not distorted nor discoloured glass, A Peep at our Ancestors”;

but her story is entirely devoid of the colour with which Mrs. Radcliffe, her model, contrived to decorate the past.  It is, moreover, written in a style so opaque that it obscures her images from view as effectually as a piece of ground glass.  To describe the approach of twilight—­an hour beloved by writers of romance—­she attempts a turgid paraphrase of Gray’s Elegy: 

“The grey shades of an autumnal evening gradually stole over the horizon, progressively throwing a duskier hue on the surrounding objects till glimmering confusion encompassing the earth shut from the accustomed eye the well-known view, leaving conjecture to mark its boundaries.”

The adventures of Adelaide and her lover, Walter of Gloucester, are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to “leave to conjecture” their interminable vicissitudes.  The names of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may be garnered by those who will, from such works as Living Authors (1817), or from the four volumes of Watts’ elaborate compilation, the Bibliotheca Britannica (1824).  The titles are, indeed, lighter and more entertaining reading than the books themselves.  Anyone might reasonably expect to read Midnight Horrors, or The Bandit’s Daughter, as Henry Tilney vows he read The Mysteries of Udolpho, with “hair on end all the time”; but the actual story, notwithstanding a wandering ball of fire, that acts as guide through the labyrinths of a Gothic castle, is conducive of sleep rather than shudders.  The notoriety of Lewis’s monk may be estimated by the procession of monks who followed in his train.  There were, to select a few names at random, The New Monk, by one R.S., Esq.; The Monk of Madrid, by George Moore (1802); The Bloody Monk of Udolpho, by T.J.  Horsley Curties; Manfroni, the One-handed Monk, whose history was borrowed, together with those of Abellino, the terrific bravo, and Rinaldo Rinaldini,[55] by “J.J.” from Miss Flinders’ library;[56] and lastly, as a counter-picture, a monk without a scowl, The Benevolent Monk, by Theodore Melville (1807).  The nuns, including “Rosa Matilda’s” Nun of St. Omer’s, Miss Sophia Francis’s Nun of Misericordia (1807) and Miss Wilkinson’s Apostate Nun, would have sufficed to people a convent.  Perhaps The Convent of the Grey Penitents would have been a suitable abode for them; but most of them were, to quote Crabbe, “girls no nunnery can tame.”  Lewis’s Venetian bravo was boldly transported to other climes.  We find him in Scotland in The Mysterious Bravo, or The Shrine of St. Alstice, A Caledonian Legend, and in Austria in The Bravo of Bohemia or The Black