borne off by a party of pirates.  He “finds the past unfortunate vicissitudes of his life amply recompensed by her love.”  In The Convent of the Grey Penitents, Rosalthe happily avoids the opiate, as she overhears the plans of her unscrupulous husband, who, it seems, has “an unquenchable thirst of avarice,” and desires to win a wealthier bride.  She flees to a “cottage ornee” on Finchley Common, the home, it may be remembered, of Thackeray’s Washerwoman; and the thrills we expect from a novel of terror are reserved for the second volume, and arise out of the adventures of the next generation.  After Rosalthe’s death, spectres, blue flames, corpses, thunderstorms and hairbreadth escapes are set forth in generous profusion.

In The Priory of St. Clair (1811), Julietta, who has been forced into a convent against her will, like so many other heroines, is drugged and conveyed as a corpse to the Count de Valve’s Gothic castle.  She comes to life only to be slain before the high altar, and revenges herself after death by haunting the count regularly every night. The Fugitive Countess or Convent of St. Ursula (1807) contains three spicy ingredients—­a mock burial, a concealed wife and a mouldering manuscript.  The social status of Miss Wilkinson’s characters is invariably lofty, for no self-respecting ghost ever troubles the middle classes; and her manner is as ambitious as her matter.  Her personages, in Lopez and Aranthe, behave and talk thus: 

“Heavenly powers!” exclaimed Aranthe, “it is Dorimont, or else my eyes deceive me!” Overpowered with surprise and almost breathless, she sunk on the carpet.  Lopez stood aghast, his countenance was of a deadly pale, a glass of wine he had in his hand he let fall to the floor, while he articulated:  “What an alteration in that once beauteous countenance!”

Miss Wilkinson’s sentences stagger and lurch uncertainly, but she delights in similes and other ornaments of style: 

“Adeline Barnett was fair as a lily, tall as the pine, her fine dark eyes sparkling as diamonds, and she moved with the majestic air of a goddess, but pride and ambition appeared on the brow of this famed maiden, and destroying the effect of her charms.”

She is, in fact, more addicted to “gramarye” than to “grammar”—­the fault with which Byron, in a note to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, charged the hero and heroine of Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel.  Her heroes do not merely love, they are “enamoured to a romantic degree.”  Her arbours are “composed of jasmine, white rose, and other odoriferous sweets of Flora.”  She sprinkles French phrases with an airy nonchalance worthy of the Lady Hysterica Belamour, whose memoirs are included in Barrett’s Heroine.  Her duchesses “figure away with eclat”—­“a party quarrie assemble at their dejeune.”  It is noteworthy that by 1820 even Miss Wilkinson had learnt to despise the spectres in whom she had gloried during her amazing career.  In The Spectre of Lanmere Abbey (1820) the ghost is ignominiously exposed, and proved to be “a tall figure dressed in white, and a long, transparent veil flowing over her whole figure,” while the heroine Amelia speaks almost in the accents of Catherine Morland: