The “_Sicilian Romance_” is a work of much more “mark and likelihood;” and, very soon after its first appearance, attracted a considerable share of public attention. Here the softer blandishments of our author’s style, which were scarcely perceptible in her first production, were spread forth to captivate the fancy. Transported to the “sweet south,” her genius, which had shrunk in the bleak atmosphere of Scotland, caught the luxurious spirit of a happier clime. Never was a title more justly applied than to this romance; it reminds the reader of “Sicilian fruitfulness.” In tender and luxurious description of natural scenery, it is surpassed by none of Mrs. Radcliffe’s productions. The flight of her heroine is like a strain of “lengthened sweetness long drawn out;”—as one series of delicious valleys opens on us after another; and the purple light of love is shed over all. Still she had not yet acquired a mastery over her own power of presenting terrific incidents and scenes to the eye of the mind, and awakening the throbs of suspense by mysterious suggestions. The light seen through the closed windows of the deserted rooms—the confession of Vincent stopped by death—the groans heard from beneath Ferdinand’s prison—and the figure perceived stealing among the vaults, are not introduced with sufficient earnestness, and lose all claim to belief, by the utter incredibility of the incidents, with which they are surrounded. Escapes, recaptions, encounters with fathers and banditti, surprising partings, and more surprising meetings, follow each other as quickly as the changes of a pantomime, and with almost as little of intelligible connexion. One example may suffice.—Hippolitus enters a ruin by moonlight, for shelter; hears a voice as of a person in agony; sees, through a shattered casement, a group of banditti plundering a man, who turns out to be Ferdinand, his intended brother-in-law; finds himself, he knows not how, in a vault; hears a scream from an inner apartment; bursts open the door and discovers a lady fainting, whom he recognizes as his mistress; overhears a quarrel and combat for the lady between two of the banditti, which ends in the death of one of them; fights with the survivor, and kills him; endeavours to escape with Julia; finds his way into a “dark abyss,” which is no other than the burial-place of the victims of the banditti, marked with graves, and strewed with unburied carcases; climbs to a grate, and witnesses a combat between the robbers and officers of justice; escapes with the lady through a secret door into the forest, where they are pursued by her father’s party; but, while he fights at the mouth of a cavern, she loses her way in its recesses, till they actually conduct her to the dungeon where her mother, who had been considered dead for fifteen years, is imprisoned;—and all this in a few pages! There are, in this short story, incidents enough for two such works as “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” where, as in that great romance,