Miss Austen, with her swift stiletto, and Barrett, with his brutal bludgeon—­to use a metaphor of “terror”—­had each delivered an attack; and in 1818, if we may judge by Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, there is a change of fashion in fiction.  How far this change is due to the satirists it is impossible to determine.  Mr. Flosky, “who has seen too many ghosts himself to believe in their external appearance,” through whose lips Peacock reviles “that part of the reading public which shuns the solid food of reason,” probably gives the true cause for the waning popularity of the novel of terror: 

“It lived upon ghosts, goblins and skeletons till even the devil himself ... became too base, common and popular for its surfeited appetite.  The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness.”

The novel of terror has been destroyed not by its enemies but by its too ardent devotees.  The horrid banquet, devoured with avidity for so many years, has become so highly seasoned that the jaded palate at last cries out for something different, and, according to Peacock, finds what it desires in “the vices and blackest passions of our nature tricked out in a masquerade dress of heroism and disappointed benevolence”—­an uncomplimentary description of the Byronic hero.  Yet sensational fiction has lingered on side by side with other forms of fiction all through the nineteenth century, because it supplies a human and natural craving for excitement.  It may not be the dominant type, but it will always exist, and will produce its thrill by ever-varying devices.  Those who scoff may be taken unawares, like the company in Nightmare Abbey.  The conversation turned on the subject of ghosts, and Mr. Larynx related his delightfully compact ghost story: 

“I once saw a ghost myself in my study, which is the last place any one but a ghost would look for me.  I had not been in it for three months and was going to consult Tillotson, when, on opening the door, I saw a venerable figure in a flannel dressing-gown, sitting in my armchair, reading my Jeremy Taylor.  It vanished in a moment, and so did I, and what it was and what it wanted, I have never been able to ascertain”

—­a quieter, more inoffensive ghost than that described by Defoe in his Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions:  “A grave, ancient man, with a full-bottomed wig and a rich brocaded gown, who changed into the most horrible monster that ever was seen, with eyes like two fiery daggers red-hot.”  Mr. Flosky and Mr. Hilary have hardly declared their disbelief in ghosts when: