“The door silently opened, and a ghastly figure, shrouded in white drapery with the semblance of a bloody turban on its head, entered and stalked slowly up the apartment.  Mr. Flosky was not prepared for this apparition, and made the best of his way out at the opposite door.  Mr. Hilary and Marionetta followed screaming.  The honourable Mr. Listless, by two turns of his body, first rolled off the sofa and then under it.  Rev. Mr. Larynx leaped up and fled with so much precipitation that he overturned the table on the foot of Mr. Glowry.  Mr. Glowry roared with pain in the ears of Mr. Toobad.  Mr. Toobad’s alarm so bewildered his senses that missing the door he threw up one of the windows, jumped out in his panic, and plunged over head and ears in the moat.  Mr. Asterias and his son, who were on the watch for their mermaid, were attracted by the splashing, threw a net over him, and dragged him to land.”

In Melincourt Castle a very spacious wing was left free to the settlement of a colony of ghosts, and the Rev. Mr. Portpipe often passed the night in one of the dreaded apartments over a blazing fire, with the same invariable exorcising apparatus of a large venison pasty, a little prayer-book, and three bottles of Madeira.  Yet despite this excellent mockery, Peacock in Gryll Grange devotes a chapter to tales of terror and wonder, singling out the works of Charles Brockden Brown for praise, especially his Wieland, “one of the few tales in which the final explanation of the apparently supernatural does not destroy or diminish the original effect.”

The title Nightmare Abbey in a catalogue would undoubtedly have caught the eye of Isabella Thorp or her friend Miss Andrews, searching eagerly for “horrid mysteries,” but they would perhaps have detected the note of mockery in the name.  They would, however, have been completely deceived by the title, The Mystery of the Abbey, published in Liverpool in 1819 by T.B.  Johnson, and we can imagine their consternation and disgust on the arrival of the book from the circulating library.  The abbey is “haunted” by the proprietors of a distillery; and the spectre, described in horrible detail, proves to be a harmless idiot, with a red handkerchief round her neck.  Apart from these gibes, there is not a hint of the supernatural in the whole book.  It is a picaresque novel, written by a sportsman.  The title is merely a hoax.

Belinda Waters, the heroine of one of Crabbe’s tales, who was “by nature negatively good,” is a portrait after Miss Austen’s own heart.  Languidly reclining on her sofa with “half a shelf of circulating books” on a table at her elbow, Belinda tosses wearily aside a half-read volume of Clarissa, commended by her maid, “who had Clarissa for her heart’s dear friend.”

  “Give me,” she said, “for I would laugh or cry,
  ‘Scenes from the Life,’ and ‘Sensibility,’
  ‘Winters at Bath’:  I would that I had one! 
  ‘The Constant Lover,’ ’The Discarded Son,’[101]