true, that there is not equal discrimination in the views of natural scenery, which she presents in her romances. In them she writes of places, which she has not visited; and, like a true lover, invests absent nature with imaginary loveliness. She looks at the grandeurs and beauties of creation through a soft and tender medium, in which its graces are heightened, but some of its delicate varieties are lost. Still it is nature that we see, though touched with the hues of romance, and which could only be thus presented by one who had known, and studied its simple charms. In the estimate of Mrs. Radcliffe’s pictorial powers, we must include her persons as well as her scenes. It must be admitted that, with scarcely an exception, they are figures rather than characters. No writer ever produced so powerful an effect, without the aid of sympathy. Her machinery acts directly on her readers, and makes them tremble and weep, not for others, but for themselves. Adeline, Emily, Vivaldi, and Ellena, are nothing to us, except as filling up the scene; but it is we ourselves, who discover the manuscript in the deserted abbey; we, who are prisoners in the castle of Udolpho; we, who are inmates of Spalatro’s cottage; we, who stand before the secret tribunal of the Inquisition, and even there are startled by the mysterious voice deepening its horrors. The whole is prodigious painting, so entire as to surround us with illusion; so cunningly arranged as to harrow up the soul; and the presence of a real person would spoil its completeness. As figures, all the persons are adapted with peculiar skill to the scenes in which they appear;—the more, as they are part of one entire conception. Schedoni is the most individual and fearful; but through all the earlier parts of the romance, he stalks like a being not of this world; and works out his purposes by that which, for the time at least, we feel to be superhuman agency. But when, after glaring out upon us so long as a present demon; or felt, when unseen, as directing the whole by his awful energies; he is brought within the range of human emotion by the discovery of his supposed daughter, and an anxiety for her safety and marriage; the spell is broken. We feel the incongruity; as if a spectre should weep. To develope character was not within the scope of Mrs. Radcliffe’s plan, nor compatible with her style. At one touch of human pathos the enchantment would have been dissolved, as spells are broken by a holy word, or as the ghost of Protesilaus vanished before the earthly passion of his enamoured widow.