_The Ancient Records of the Abbey of St. Oswyth_[3] says of its setting: "The damp, cold, awe-inspiring hall seemed to conjure up ten thousand superstitious horrors and terrific imaginary apparitions." In Maturin's _Albigenses_ the knights assemble round the great fire in the baronial hall and tell ghost tales while the storm rages outside. In _Melmoth, the Wanderer_ the scene changes often, yet it is always Gothic and terrible,--the monastery with its diabolical punishments, the ancient castle, the ruined abbey by which the wanderer celebrates his marriage at midnight with a dead priest for the celebrant, the madhouse, the inquisition cells, which add gloom and horror to the supernatural incidents and characters. In _Zofloya_,[4] the maiden is imprisoned in an underground cave similar to that boasted by other castles. This novel is significant because of the freedom with which Shelley appropriated its material for his _Zastrozzi_, which likewise has the true Gothic setting. In Shelley's other romance he erects the same structure and has the devil meet his victim by the desolate, dear old Gothic abbey. [3] By T. J. Horsley-Curties. [4] By Mrs. Dacre, better known as "Rosa Matilda." Regina Maria Roche wrote a number of novels built up with crumbling castles, awesome abbeys, and donjon-keeps whose titles show the architectural fiction that dominates them. A list of the names of the Gothic novels will serve to show the general importance laid on antique setting. In fact, the castle, abbey, monastery, château, convent, or inquisition prison occupied such an important place in the story that it seemed the leading character. It dominated the events and was a malignant personality, that laid its spell upon those within its bounds. It shows something of the character that Hawthorne finally gives to his house of seven gables, or the brooding, relentless power of the sea in Synge's drama.[5] The ancient castle becomes not merely haunted itself but is the haunter as well. [5] _Riders to the Sea._ Not only is architecture made subservient to the needs of Gothic fiction, but the scenery likewise is adapted to fit it. Before Mrs. Radcliffe wrote her stories interlarded with nature descriptions, scant notice had been paid to scenery in the novel. But she set the style for morose landscapes as Walpole had for glooming castles, and the succeeding romances of the _genre_ combined both features. Mrs. Radcliffe was not at all hampered by the fact that she had never laid eyes on the scenes she so vividly pictures. She painted the dread scenery of awesome mountains and forests, beetling crags and dizzy abysses with fluent and fervent adjectives, and her successors imitated her in sketching nature with dark impressionism.