of Warsaw” than in any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the “Mysteries of Udolpho” cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the murmur of the pines, without weeping.  Every page is bedewed with the tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company.  Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under more romantic circumstances.  They are beset with a thousand difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape.  But though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all.  They rebuke the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral truths.  They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in situations the most discouraging.  Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends for the lord of the castle,—­whom she believes to have murdered her aunt,—­and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned, and will he please, therefore, send her home?

Mrs. Radcliffe’s fictions are romantic, but not usually mediaeval in subject.  In the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” the period of the action is the end of the sixteenth century; in the “Romance of the Forest,” 1658; in “The Italian,” about 1760.  But her machinery is prevailingly Gothic and the real hero of the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted building.  In the “Mysteries of Udolpho” it is a castle in the Apennines; in the “Romance of the Forest,” a deserted abbey in the depth of the woods; in “The Italian,” the cloister of the Black Penitents.  The moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases, secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive from “Otranto.”  So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of desolation; the strains of mysterious music, the apparitions which glide through the shadowy apartments, the hollow voices that warn the tyrant to beware.  But her method here is quite different from Walpole’s; she tacks a natural explanation to every unearthly sight or sound.  The hollow voices turn out to be ventriloquism; the figure of a putrefying corpse which Emily sees behind the black curtain in the ghost chamber at Udolpho is only a wax figure, contrived as a memento mori for a former penitent.  After the reader has once learned this trick he refuses to be imposed upon again, and, whenever he encounters a spirit, feels sure that a future chapter will embody it back into flesh and blood.