It would be tedious to give here an analysis of these once famous fictions _seriatim_.[19] They were very long, very much alike, and very much overloaded with sentiment and description. The plots were complicated and abounded in the wildest improbabilities and in those incidents which were once the commonplaces of romantic fiction and which realism has now turned out of doors: concealments, assassinations, duels, disguises, kidnappings, escapes, elopements, intrigues, forged documents, discoveries of old crimes, and identifications of lost heirs. The characters, too, were of the conventional kind. There were dark-browed, crime-stained villains--forerunners, perhaps of Manfred and Lara, for the critics think that Mrs. Radcliffe's stories were not without important influence on Byron.[20] There were high-born, penitent dames who retired to convents in expiation of sins which are not explained until the general raveling of clews in the final chapter. There were bravoes, banditti, feudal tyrants, monks, inquisitors, soubrettes, and simple domestics _a la_ Bianca, in Walpole's romance. The lover was of the type adored by our great-grandmothers, handsome, melancholy, passionate, respectful but desperate, a user of most choice English; with large black eyes, smooth white forehead, and jetty curls, now sunk, Mr. Perry says, to the covers of prune boxes. The heroine, too, was sensitive and melancholy. When alone upon the seashore or in the mountains, at sunset or twilight, or under the midnight moon, or when the wind is blowing, she overflows into stanza or sonnet, "To Autumn," "To Sunset," "To the Bat," "To the Nightingale," "To the Winds," "To Melancholy," "Song of the Evening Hour." We have heard this pensive music drawing near in the strains of the Miltonic school, but in Mrs. Radcliffe the romantic gloom is profound and all-pervading. In what pastures she had fed is manifest from the verse captions that head her chapters, taken mainly from Blair, Thomson, Warton, Gray, Collins, Beattie, Mason, and Walpole's "Mysterious Mother." Here are a few stanzas from her ode "To Melancholy": "Spirit of love and sorrow, hail! Thy solemn voice from far I hear, Mingling with evening's dying gale: Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear! "O at this still, this lonely hour-- Thine own sweet hour of closing day-- Awake thy lute, whose charmful power Shall call up fancy to obey: "To paint the wild, romantic dream That meets the poet's closing eye, As on the bank of shadowy stream He breathes to her the fervid sigh. "O lonely spirit, let thy song Lead me through all thy sacred haunt, The minster's moonlight aisles along Where specters raise the midnight chant."