giving a perfectly unnecessary warning and the catastrophe is soon reached by the final appearance of the whole suit of armour with the ghost inside it, who bursts the castle to bits like an egg-shell, and, towering towards the sky, exclaims, 'Theodore is the true heir of Alphonso!' This proceeding fortunately made a lawsuit unnecessary, and if the castle was ruined at once, it is not quite impossible that the same result might have been attained more slowly by litigation. The whole machinery strikes us as simply babyish, unless we charitably assume the whole to be intentionally burlesque. The intention is pretty evident in the solemn scene in the chapel, which closes thus:--'As he spake these words, three drops of blood fell from the nose of Alphonso's statue' (Alphonso is the spectre in armour). 'Manfred turned pale, and the princess sank on her knees. "Behold!" said the friar, "mark this miraculous indication that the blood of Alphonso will never mix with that of Manfred!"' Nor can we think that the story is rendered much more interesting by Walpole's simple expedient of introducing into the midst of these portents a set of waiting-maids and peasants, who talk in the familiar style of the smart valets in Congreve's or Sheridan's comedies. Yet, babyish as this mass of nursery tales may appear to us, it is curious that the theory which Walpole advocated has been exactly carried out. He wished to relieve the prosaic realism of the school of Fielding and Smollett by making use of romantic associations, without altogether taking leave of the language of common life. He sought to make real men and women out of mediaeval knights and ladies, or, in other words, he made a first experimental trip into the province afterwards occupied by Scott. The 'Mysterious Mother' is in the same taste; and his interest in Ossian, in Chatterton, and in Percy's Relics, is another proof of his anticipation of the coming change of sentiment. He was an arrant trifler, it is true; too delicately constituted for real work in literature and politics, and inclined to take a cynical view of his contemporaries generally, he turned for amusement to antiquarianism, and was the first to set modern art and literature masquerading in the antique dresses. That he was quite conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his letters, in one of which, for example, he proposes a systematic history of Gothic architecture, such as has since been often enough executed. It does not, it may be said, require any great intellect, or even any exquisite taste, for a fine gentleman to strike out a new line of dilettante amusement. In truth Walpole has no pretensions whatever to be regarded as a great original creator, or even as one of the few infallible critics. The only man of his time who had some claim to that last title was his friend Gray, who shared his Gothic tastes with greatly superior knowledge. But he was indefinitely superior