A tragic story runs through the novel, which becomes intensely dramatic at the point where William puts on his black cap to pronounce sentence on the girl whom he had ruined years before. He does not recognise her; but she, who had loved him through the years, becomes insane, not at the thought of death, but that he should be the one to pronounce the sentence. It is doubtful if any novelist before Scott had produced so thrilling a situation, a situation which grew naturally out of the plot, and the anguish of the poor unfortunate Agnes has the realism of Thomas Hardy or Tolstoi. Only by reading these old novels can one comprehend the change produced in England by the next half-century. The teachings of Mrs. Charlotte Smith and Mrs. Inchbald were declared dangerous to the state. That they taught disrespect for authority, was one of the many charges brought against them. Yet with what ladylike reserve they advance views which a later generation applauded when boldly proclaimed by Dickens, Thackeray, and Disraeli! CHAPTER VI Clara Reeve. Ann Radcliffe. Harriet and Sophia Lee The novel of the mysterious and the supernatural did not appear in modern literature until Horace Walpole wrote _The Castle of Otranto_ in 1764, during the decade that was dominated by the realism of Smollett and Sterne. The author says it was an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient, which was all improbable, and the modern, which was a realistic copy of nature. The machinery of this novel is clumsy. An enormous helmet and a huge sword are the means by which an ancestor of Otranto, long since dead, restores the castle to a seeming peasant, who proves to be the rightful heir. * * * * * This book produced no imitators until 1777, when Clara Reeve wrote _The Old English Baron_, which was plainly suggested by Walpole's novel, but is more delicate in the treatment of its ghostly visitants. Here, as in _The Castle of Otranto_, the rightful heir has been brought up a peasant, ignorant of his high birth. Again his ancestors, supposedly dead and gone, bring him into his own. One night he is made to sleep in the haunted part of the castle, where his parents reveal to him in a dream things which he is later able to prove legally. He learns the truth about his birth, comes into his estate, and wins the lady of his heart. When he returns to the castle as its master, all the doors fly open through the agency of unseen hands to welcome their feudal lord. The characters of both these novels are without interest, and the mysterious element fails to produce the slightest creepy thrill. * * * * *