author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his "Life and Letters of William Beckford." Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright. But Beckford remained alone In his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of terror-literature in these times may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who followed his famous but non-supernatural "Caleb Williams" (1794) with the intendedly weird "St. Leon" (1799) in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of "Roticrucians," is handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's "The Magus" (1801), a curious and compendius treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by George W.M. Reynolds' "Faust and the Demon" and "Wagner and the Wehr-Wolf." "Caleb Williams," though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of a murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion of this day. It was dramatised as "The Iron Chest," and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece.