The satirical use of supernaturalism is also new. Late literature laughs at everything, with a daring familiarity undreamed of before, save in sporadic cases. The devil has been an ancient subject for laughter, but recent fiction ridicules him still more, so that we have scant respect for him, while the ghost, formerly a personage held in great respect, now comes in for his share of ragging. No being is too sacred to escape the light arrows of fun. Heaven is satirically exploited, and angels, saints, and even Deity have become subjects for jesting, conventionalized with the mother-in-law, the tenderfoot, the Irishman, and so forth. There is a considerable body of anecdotal literature of the supernatural, showing to what extent the levity of treatment has gone. Various aspects of mortal life are satirized, as in Inez Haynes Gilmore's _Angel Island_, which is a campaign document for woman's suffrage. Satiric supernaturalism is employed to drive home many truths, to puncture conceits of all kinds, and when well done is effective, for laughter is a clever weapon. The advance of the later supernatural fiction over the earlier is nowhere seen more distinctly than in the increased effectiveness with which it manages the mechanics of emotion, its skill in selecting and elaborating the details by which terror and awe are produced. The present-day artist of the uncanny knows how to strike the varied tones of supernaturalism, the shrill notes of fear, the deep diapason of awe, the crashing chords of horror. The skillful writer chooses with utmost care the seemingly trivial details that go to make up the atmosphere of the unearthly. Shakespeare was a master of that, but none other of his time. The knocking at the gate in _Macbeth_, for instance, is a perfect example of the employment of a natural incident to produce an effect of the supernatural, as De Quincey has pointed out in his essay on the subject. The Gothic novel relied largely for its impressiveness on emphasizing ghostly scenes by representing aspects of weather to harmonize with the emotions of the characters. This was overworked in terror fiction, and while it still possesses power it is a much less common method of technique than it used to be. Poe's introductory paragraph in _The Fall of the House of Usher_ is a notable example of skill in creating atmosphere of the supernatural by various details including phenomena of weather, and Hardy shows special power in harmonizing nature to the moods and purposes of his characters. Yet many a modern story produces a profound sense of awe, and purges the soul by means of terror with no reference at all to foreboding weather. However, the allusions now made are more skillful and show more selective power than of old.