Forest.  No country is safe from the raids of banditti. The Caledonian Banditti or The Banditti of the Forest, or The Bandit of Florence—­all very much alike in their manners and morals—­make the heroine’s journey a perilous enterprise.  The romances of Mrs. Radcliffe were rifled unscrupulously by the snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, and many of the titles are variations on hers.  In emulation of The Romance of the Forest we find George Walker’s Romance of the Cavern (1792) and Miss Eleanor Sleath’s Mysteries of the Forest.  Novelists appreciated the magnetic charm of the word “mystery” on a title-page, and after The Mysteries of Udolpho we find such seductive names as Mysterious Warnings and Mysterious Visits, by Mrs. Parsons; Horrid Mysteries, translated from the German of the Marquis von Grosse, by R. Will (1796); The Mystery of the Black Tower and The Mystic Sepulchre, by John Palmer, a schoolmaster of Bath; The Mysterious Wanderer (1807), by Miss Sophia Reeve; The Mysterious Hand or Subterranean Horrors (1811), by A.J.  Randolph; and The Mysterious Freebooter (1805), by Francis Lathom.  Castles and abbeys were so persistently haunted that Mrs. Rachel Hunter, a severely moral writer, advertises one of her stories as Letitia:  A Castle Without a Spectre.  Mystery slips, almost unawares, into the domestic story.  There are, for instance, vague hints of it in Charlotte Smith’s Old Manor House (1793).  The author of The Ghost and of More Ghosts adopts the pleasing pseudonym of Felix Phantom.  The gloom of night broods over many of the stories, for we know: 

      “affairs that walk,
  As they say spirits do, at midnight, have
  In them a wilder nature than the business
  That seeks despatch by day,”

and we are confronted with titles like Midnight Weddings, by Mrs. Meeke, one of Macaulay’s favourite “bad-novel writers,” The Midnight Bell, awakening memories of Duncan’s murder, by George Walker, or The Nocturnal Minstrel (1809), by Miss Sleath.  These “dismal treatises” abound in reminiscences of Mrs. Radcliffe and of “Monk” Lewis, and many of them hark back as far as The Castle of Otranto for some of their situations.  The novels of Miss Wilkinson may perhaps serve as well as those of any of her contemporaries to show that Scott was not unduly harsh in his condemnation of the romances fashionable in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when “tales of terror jostle on the road."[57] The sleeping potion, a boon to those who weave the intricate pattern of a Gothic romance, is one of Miss Wilkinson’s favourite devices, and is employed in at least three of her stories.  In The Chateau de Montville (1803) it is administered to the amiable Louisa to aid Augustine in his sinister designs, but she ultimately escapes, and is wedded by Octavius, who has previously been