invested; for there is nothing extraordinary in the fate of a despicable woman, worried into the grave by her husband, because she will not give up her settlement. The mysteries of Chateau le Blanc are less majestic than those of Udolpho, but perhaps they are even more touching; at least, the visit of Emily to the chamber where the Marchioness died, twenty years before, not without suspicion of poison, and which had been shut up ever since, is most affecting and fearful. The faded magnificence of the vast apartment; the black pall lying on the bed, as when it decked the corpse; the robe and articles of dress remaining as they had been carelessly scattered in the lifetime of their owner; her veil, which hand had never approached since, now dropping into pieces; her lute on the table, as it was touched on the evening of her death; would be solemn and spectral, even if the pall did not move and a face arise from beneath it. This scene derives a tenderer interest from the strange likeness, which Emily seems to bear to the deceased lady, and which is artfully heightened by the action of the old housekeeper throwing the black veil over her, and by her touching the long-neglected lute. Such are some among the many striking features of this romance; its defects are great and obvious. Its mysteries are not only resolved into natural causes, but are explained by circumstances provokingly trivial. What reader would bear to be told that the black veil, from which his imagination has scarcely been allowed to turn for three volumes, conceals a waxen image; that the wild music, which has chanced to float on the air, in all the awful pauses of action, proceeded from an insane nun, permitted to wander about the woods; and that the words, which startled Montoni and his friends, at their guilty carousals, were uttered by a man wandering through a secret passage almost without motive; unless the power and sweetness of the spell remained after it was thus rudely broken?