At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed His will, and disregarded His word--is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow or earth could afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? No, there is not one--not such a fool on earth were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer! True, the theme of such devil-pact had appeared in folk-tales and in the drama previously, notably in Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_, but Maturin here gives the idea a dramatic twist and psychologic poignancy by making a human being the one to seek to buy another's soul to save his own. A mortal, cursed with physical immortality, ceaselessly harried across the world by the hounds of fate, forever forced by an irresistible urge to make his impitiable offer to tormented souls, and always meeting a tragic refusal, offers dramatic possibilities of a high order and Maturin's story has a dreadful power. Clara Reeve's avowed purpose in writing _The Old English Baron_ was to produce a ghost story that should be more probable and realistic than Walpole's. She stated that her book was the literary offspring of the earlier romance, though Walpole disclaimed the paternity. She deplored the violence of the supernatural machinery that tended to defeat its own impressiveness and wished to avoid that danger in her work, though she announced: "We can conceive and allow for the appearance of a ghost." Her prim recipe for Romantic fiction required, "a certain degree of the marvelous to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic to engage the heart in its behalf." But her ingredients did not mix well and the result was rather indigestible though devoured by hungry readers of her time. Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, that energetic manipulator of Gothic enginery, wrote because she had time that was wasting on her hands,--which may be an explanation for other and later literary attempts. Her journalist husband was away till late at night, so while sitting up for him she wrote frightful stories to keep herself from being scared. During that waiting loneliness she doubtless experienced all those nervous terrors that she describes as being undergone by her palpitating maidens, whose emotional anguish is suffered in midnight wanderings through subterranean passages and ghosted apartments. There is one report that she went mad from over-much brooding on mormo, but that is generally discredited.