indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe:  her disciples are Miss Austen, Byron, Miss Bronte, and Mr. Louis Stevenson!  Ferdinand “began the ascent.  He had not proceeded very far, when the stones of a step which his foot had just quitted gave way, and, dragging with them those adjoining, formed a chasm in the staircase that terrified even Ferdinand, who was left tottering on the suspended half of the steps, in momentary expectation of falling to the bottom with the stone on which he rested.  In the terror which this occasioned, he attempted to save himself by catching at a kind of beam which suspended over the stairs, when the lamp dropped from his hand, and he was left in total darkness.”

Can anything be more “amazing horrid,” above all as there are mysterious figures in and about the tower?  Mrs. Radcliffe’s lamps always fall, or are blown out, in the nick of time, an expedient already used by Clara Reeve in that very mild but once popular ghost story, “The Old English Baron” (1777).  All authors have such favourite devices, and I wonder how many fights Mr. Stanley Weyman’s heroes have fought, from the cellar to their favourite tilting ground, the roof of a strange house!

Ferdinand hung on to the beam for an hour, when the ladies came with a light, and he scrambled back to solid earth.  In his next nocturnal research, “a sullen groan arose from beneath where he stood,” and when he tried to force a door (there are scores of such weird doors in Mrs. Radcliffe) “a groan was repeated, more hollow and dreadful than the first.  His courage forsook him”—­and no wonder!  Of course he could not know that the author of the groans was, in fact, his long-lost mother, immured by his father, the wicked Marquis.  We need not follow the narrative through the darkling crimes and crumbling galleries of this terrible castle on the north coast of Sicily.  Everybody is always “gazing in silent terror,” and all the locks are rusty.  “A savage and dexterous banditti” play a prominent part, and the imprisoned Ferdinand “did not hesitate to believe that the moans he heard came from the restless spirit of the murdered della Campo.”  No working hypothesis could seem more plausible, but it was erroneous.  Mrs. Radcliffe does not deal in a single avowed ghost.  She finally explains away, by normal causes, everything that she does not forget to explain.  At the most, she indulges herself in a premonitory dream.  On this point she is true to common sense, without quite adopting the philosophy of David Hume.  “I do not say that spirits have appeared,” she remarks, “but if several discreet unprejudiced persons were to assure me that they had seen one—­I should not be bold or proud enough to reply, it is impossible!” But Hume was bold and proud enough:  he went further than Mrs. Radcliffe.