out, and Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”  That very year saw the publication of the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.”  By 1826 the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of the Gothic type hopelessly obsolete.  In 1834 two volumes of her poems were given to the world, including a verse romance in eight cantos, “St. Alban’s Abbey,” and the verses scattered through her novels.  By this time Scott and Coleridge were dead; Byron, Shelley, and Keats had been dead for years, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s poesies fell upon the unheeding ears of a new generation.  A sneer in “Waverley” (1814) at the “Mysteries of Udolpho” had hurt her feelings;[28] but Scott made amends in the handsome things which he said of her in his “Lives of the Novelists.”  It is interesting to note that when the “Mysteries” was issued, the venerable Joseph Warton was so much entranced that he sat up the greater part of the night to finish it.

The warfare between realism and romance, which went on in the days of Cervantes, as it does in the days of Zola and Howells, had its skirmished also in Mrs. Radcliffe’s time.  Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” written in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic fiction.  The heroine is devoted to the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” which she discusses with her bosom friend.  “While I have ‘Udolpho’ to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable.  O the dreadful black veil!  My dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina’s skeleton behind it.”

“When you have finished ‘Udolpho,’” replies Isabella, “we will read ’The Italian’ together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you. . .  I will read you their names directly.  Here they are in my pocket-book.  ‘Castle of Wolfenbach,’ ‘Clermont,’ ‘Mysterious Warnings,’ ‘Necromancer of the Black Forest,’ ’Midnight Bell,’ ‘Orphan of the Rhine,’ and ‘Horrid Mysteries.’”

When introduced to her friend’s brother, Miss Morland asks him at once, “Have you ever read ‘Udolpho,’ Mr. Thorpe?” But Mr. Thorpe, who is not a literary man, but much given to dogs and horses, assures her that he never reads novels; they are “full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since ‘Tom Jones,’ except the ‘Monk.’” The scenery about Bath reminds Miss Morland of the south of France and “the country that Emily and her father traveled through in the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho.’” She is enchanted at the prospect of a drive to Blaize Castle, where she hopes to have “the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults by a low, grated door; or even of having their lamp—­their only lamp—­extinguished by a sudden gust of wind and of being left in total darkness.”  She visits her friends, the Tilneys, at their country seat, Northanger Abbey, in Glouchestershire; and, on the way thither, young Mr. Tilney teases her with a fancy sketch of the Gothic horrors which she will unearth there:  the “sliding panels and