The pages of the Gothic novel are smeared with gore and turn with ghostly flutter. The conversation is like nothing on land or sea or in the waters under the earth, for the tadpoles talk like Johnsonian whales and the reader grows restless under Godwinistic disquisitions. The authors are almost totally lacking in a sense of humor, yet the Gothic novel, taken as a whole, is one of the best specimens of unconscious humor known to English literature. =Conclusion.= Perhaps the most valuable contribution that the Gothic school made to English literature is Jane Austen's inimitable satire of it, _Northanger Abbey_. Though written as her first novel and sold in 1797, it did not appear till after her death, in 1818. Its purpose is to ridicule the Romanticists and the book in itself would justify the terroristic school, but she was ahead of her times, so the editor feared to publish it. In the meantime she wrote her other satires on society and won immortality for her work which might never have been begun save for her satiety of medieval romances. The title of the story itself is imitative, and the well-known materials are all present, yet how differently employed! The setting is a Gothic abbey tempered to modern comfort; the interfering father is not vicious, merely ill-natured; the pursuing, repulsive lover is not a villain, only a silly bore. The heroine has no beauty, nor does she topple into sonnets nor snatch a pencil to sketch the scene, for we are told that she has no accomplishments. Yet she goes through palpitating adventures mostly modelled on Mrs. Radcliffe's incidents. She is hampered in not being supplied with a lover who is the unrecognized heir to vast estates, since all the young men in the county are properly provided with parents. The delicious persiflage in which Jane Austen hits off the fiction of the day may be illustrated by a bit of conversation between two young girls. "My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all the morning? Have you gone on with _Udolpho_?" "Yes; I have been reading it ever since I woke, and I have got to the black veil." "Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh, I would not tell you what is behind that black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?" "Oh, yes, quite! What can it be? But do not tell me--I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh, I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life reading it, I assure you. If it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for the world." "Dear creature! How much obliged I am to you; and when you have finished _Udolpho_, we will read _The Italian_ together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you." "Have you, indeed? How glad I am! What are they all?"