“We went to see heaven knows how many more palaces—­Ranuzzi, Marriscalchi, Aldobrandi.  If you want Italian names for any purpose, here they are; I should be glad of them if I was writing a novel.”

Zastrozzi was published in April, 1810, while Shelley was still at Eton, and with the L40 paid for the romance, he is said to have given a banquet to eight of his friends.  Though the story is little more than a rechauffe of previous tales of terror, it evidently attained some measure of popularity.  It was reprinted in The Romancist and Novelist’s Library in 1839.  Like Godwin, Shelley contrived to smuggle a little contraband theory into his novels, but his stock-in-trade is mainly that of the terrormongers.  The book to which Shelley was chiefly indebted was Zofloya or the Moor (1806), by the notorious Charlotte Dacre or “Rosa Matilda,” but there are many reminiscences of Mrs. Radcliffe and of “Monk” Lewis.  The sources of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne have been investigated in the Modern Language Review (Jan. 1912), by Mr. A. M. D. Hughes, who gives a complete analysis of the plot of Zofloya, and indicates many parallels with Shelley’s novels.  The heroine of Zofloya is clearly a lineal descendant of Lewis’s Matilda, though Victoria di Loredani, with all her vices, never actually degenerates into a fiend.  Victoria, it need hardly be stated, is nobly born, but she has been brought up amid frivolous society by a worthless mother, and:  “The wildest passions predominated in her bosom; to gratify them she possessed an unshrinking, relentless soul that would not startle at the darkest crime.”

Zofloya, who spurs her on, is the Devil himself.  The plot is highly melodramatic, and contains a headlong flight, an earthquake and several violent deaths.  In Zastrozzi, Shelley draws upon the characters and incidents of this story very freely.  His lack of originality is so obvious as to need no comment.  The very names he chooses are borrowed.  Julia is the name of the pensive heroine in Mrs. Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance.  Matilda carries with it ugly memories of the lady in Lewis’s Monk; Verezzi occurs in The Mysteries of Udolpho; Zastrozzi is formed by prefixing an extra syllable to the name Strozzi from Zofloya.  The incidents are those which happen every day in the realm of terror.  The villain, the hero, the melancholy heroine, and her artful rival, develop no new traits, but act strictly in accordance with tradition.  They never infringe the rigid code of manners and morals laid down for them by previous generations.  The scenery is invariably appropriate as a setting to the incidents, and even the weather may be relied on to act in a thoroughly conventional manner.  The characters are remarkable for their violent emotions and their marvellously expressive eyes.  When Verezzi’s senses are “chilled with the frigorific torpidity of despair,” his eyes “roll