escape by bribing the jailor.  He travels to Italy, but is unable to escape from misfortune.  Suspected of black magic, he becomes an object of hatred to the inhabitants of the town where he lives.  His house is burnt down, his servant and his favourite dog are killed, and he soon hears of the death of his unhappy wife.  He is imprisoned in the dungeons of the Inquisition, but escapes, and takes refuge with a Jew, whom he compels to shelter him, until another dose of the elixir restores his youthful appearance, and he sets forth again, this time disguised as a wealthy Spanish cavalier.  He visits his own daughters, representing himself as the executor under their father’s will.  He decides to devote himself to the service of others, and is revered as the saviour of Hungary, until disaffection, caused by a shortage of food, renders him unpopular.  He makes a friend of Bethlem Gabor, whose wife and children have been savagely murdered by a band of marauders.  St. Leon, we are told, “found an inexhaustible and indescribable pleasure in examining the sublime desolation of a mighty soul.”  But Gabor soon conceives a bitter hatred against him, and entraps him in a subterranean vault, where he languishes for many months, refusing to yield up his secret.  At length the castle is besieged, and Gabor before his death gives St. Leon his liberty.  The leader of the expedition proves to be St. Leon’s long-lost son, Charles, who has assumed the name of De Damville.  St. Leon, without at first revealing his identity, cultivates the friendship of his son, but Charles, on learning of his dealings with the supernatural, repudiates his father.  Finally the marriage of his son to Pandora proves to St. Leon that despite his misfortunes “there is something in this world worth living for.”

The Inquisition scenes of St. Leon were undoubtedly coloured faintly by those of Lewis’s Monk (1794) and Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian (1798); but it is characteristic of Godwin that instead of trying to portray the terror of the shadowy hall, he chooses rather to present the argumentative speeches of St. Leon and the Inquisitor.  The aged stranger, who bestows on St. Leon the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, has the piercing eye so familiar to readers of the novel of terror:  “You wished to escape from its penetrating power, but you had not the strength to move.  I began to feel as if it were some mysterious and superior being in human form;"[86] but apart from this trait he is not an impressive figure.  The only character who would have felt perfectly at home in the realm of Mrs. Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis is Bethlem Gabor, who appears for the first time in the fourth volume of St. Leon.  He is akin to Schedoni and his compeers in his love of solitude, his independence of companionship, and his superhuman aspect, but he is a figure who inspires awe and pity as well as terror.  Beside this personage the other characters pale into insignificance: