Why Mrs. Radcliffe, having reached such a pitch of success, never again published a novel, remains more mysterious than any of her Mysteries. Scott justly remarks that her censors attacked her "by showing that she does not possess the excellences proper to a style of composition totally different from that which she has attempted." This is the usual way of reviewers. Tales that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, "which possess charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and gay, the gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be dismissed with a sneer by people who have never read them. Following Horace Walpole in some degree, Mrs. Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis, and Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled the gap between Smollett and Miss Austen. Mrs. Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance burning much more steadily than the lamps which, in her novels, are always blown out, in the moment of excited apprehension, by the night wind walking in the dank corridors of haunted abbeys. But mark the cruelty of an intellectual parent! Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe's father in the spirit. Yet, on September 4, 1794, he wrote to Lady Ossory: "I have read some of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your Ladyship says I was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe?). "All I can say for myself is that I do not think my concubines have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of anything marvellous." CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830 The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long is one of the happier moments in life. Whatever we may think of life when we contemplate it as a whole, it is a delight to discover what one has sought for years, especially if the book be a book which you really want to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the fashion of collecting. Perhaps nobody ever collected before THE DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY A NECROMAUNT In Three Chimeras BY THOMAS T. STODDART. "Is't like that lead contains her?-- It were too gross To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."-- _Shakespeare_. EDINBURGH: Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh, And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London. MDCCCXXXI.