There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of these romances.  Thackeray says that a lady of his acquaintance, an inveterate novel reader, names Valancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth.  “‘Valancourt?  And who was he?’ cry the young people.  Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country.  The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmamma’s’ gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy.  He and his glory have passed away. . .  Enquire at Mudie’s or the London Library, who asks for the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho’ now."[22] Hazlitt said that he owed to Mrs. Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn leaves and decaying ruins.  It was, indeed, in the melodramatic manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original.  “The scenes that savage Rosa dashed” seemed to have been her model, and critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction.  It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most apparent.[23] Mrs. Radcliffe’s scenery is not quite to our modern taste, any more than are Salvator’s paintings.  Her Venice by moonlight, her mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic stage.  Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department she possessed genuine poetic feels and a real mastery of the art of painting in distemper.  Witness the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on Emily’s first sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in the “Romance of the Forest,” of the ruined abbey in which the La Motte family take refuge:  “He approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an abbey:  it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a romantic gloom around.  The greater part of the pile appeared to be sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the ravages of time showed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay.  The lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished and become the residence of birds of prey.  Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly in the breeze.  ’The thistle shook its lonely head:  the moss whistled to the wind.’[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire.  Above the vast and magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose pointed arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once the pride of monkish devotion.  La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker.  The hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place.  After waiting a few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and creaked harshly on its hinges. . .  From this chapel he passed into the nave of the great church, of which one window, more perfect than the rest, opened upon a long vista of the forest, through which was seen the rich coloring of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations into the solemn gray of upper air.”