The goblins and phantoms devised by James are truly creative and are presented through images often so keen and vivid as to evoke an actual physical shock. Sight, smell, hearing, taction, all are played upon with well nigh surgical sureness, by impressions calculated to touch the shuddering quick of horror. Some of the images or similes employed are most extraordinary, and spring surely from the demonic inspiration of the highest genius. For instance, take the unnameable thing in _The Uncommon Prayer Book_, which resembles "a great roll of old, shabby, white flannel," with a kind of face in the upper end, and which falls forward on a man's shoulder and hides this face in his neck like a ferret attacking a rabbit. Then, in _Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance_ (one of subtler and more inferential tales) there is the form "with a burnt human face" and "black arms", that emerges from an inexplicable hole in the paper plan of a garden maze "with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple." In _The Tractate Middoth_ one meets an apparition with thick cobwebs over its eyes--the lich or specter of a man who, obedient to his own rather eccentric instructions, had been buried sitting at a table in an underground room. And who, upon reading _The Diary of Mr. Poynter_, can fail to share Denton's revulsion when he reaches out, thinking that a dog is beside his chair, and touches a crawling figure covered with long, wavy, Absolom-like tresses? Who, too, can shake off the horror of Dennistoun, in _Canon Alberic's Scrap Book_, when a demon's hand appears from beneath on the table, suggesting momentarily a pen wiper, a rat, and a large spider? Reading and re-reading these tales, one notes a predilection for certain milieus and motifs. Backgrounds of scholastic or ecclesiastic life are frequent and some of the best tales are laid in cathedral towns; in many of the supernatural entities, there recurs insistently the character of extreme and repulsive _hairiness_. Often the apparition is connected with, or evoked by, some material object, such as the bronze whistle from the ruins of a Templars' preceptory in _Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad_; the old drawing of King Solomon and the night demon in _Canon Alberic's Scrap Book_; the silver Anglo-Saxon crown from an immemorial barrow in _A Warning to the Curious_; and the strange curtain-pattern in _The Diary of Mr. Poynter_ which had "a subtlety in its drawing."