Udolpho have been shown to be the wanton trick of a prisoner, we still revert to the remaining prodigies with anxious curiosity, and are prepared to give implicit credence to new wonders at Chateau le Blanc. In the romance of Gaston de Blondeville, Mrs. Radcliffe, not intending to publish, gratified herself by the introduction of a true spectre; and, without anticipating the opinion of the public on that work, we may venture to express a belief, that the manner, in which the supernatural agency is conducted, will deepen the general regret, that she did not employ it in her longer and more elaborate productions. II. Mrs. Radcliffe’s faculties of describing and picturing scenes and appropriate figures was of the highest order. Her accurate observation of inanimate nature, prompted by an intense love of all its varieties, supplied the materials for those richly coloured representations, which her genius presented. Without this perception of the true, the liveliest fancy will only produce a chaos of beautiful images, like the remembered fragments of a gorgeous dream. How singularly capable Mrs. Radcliffe was of painting the external world, in its naked grandeur, her published tour among the English Lakes, and, perhaps still more, the notes made on her journeys for her own amusement, abundantly prove. In the first, the boldness and simplicity of her strokes, conveying the clear images to the eye of the mind, with scarcely any incrustation of sentiment, or perplexing dazzle of fancy, distinguish her from almost all other descriptive tourists. Still the great charm of simplicity was hardly so complete, as in her unstudied notices of scenery; because in writing for the press, it is scarcely possible to avoid altogether the temptation of high sounding and ambiguous expressions, which always impede the distant presentiment of material forms. To this difficulty, she thus adverts in her account of Ulswater. “It is difficult to spread varied pictures of such scenes before the imagination. A repetition of the same images of rock, wood, and water, and the same epithets of grand, vast, and sublime, which necessarily occur, must appear tautologous, though their archetypes in nature, ever varying in outline or arrangement, exhibit new visions to the eye, and produce new shades of effect on the mind.” In the journals, as no idea of authorship interposed to give restraint to her style, there is entire fidelity and truth. She seems the very chronicler and secretary of nature; makes us feel the freshness of the air; and listen to the gentlest sounds. Not only does she keep each scene distinct from all others, however similar in general character; but discriminates its shifting aspects with the most delicate exactness. No aerial tint of a fleecy cloud is too evanescent to be imaged in her transparent style. Perhaps no writer in prose, or verse, has been so happy in describing the varied effects of light in winged words. It is