SOURCE: A review of In a Glass Darkly, in The Saturday Review, London, August 17, 1872, pp. 222-23.

In the following excerpt, the anonymous critic unfavorably reviews Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly.

Mr. Le Fanu, having written some four or five foolish and vulgar ghost stories, presents them to the world as belonging to "metaphysical speculation," or "religious metaphysics," or "metaphysical medicine." He informs us that he has the stories from "the immense collection of papers" left by Dr. Martin Hesselius, a man whose "knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition." Happily for the non-scientific world, the Doctor "writes in two distinct characters." As Mr. Le Fanu says:—

He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he had seen the patient either through his own halldoor to the light of day, or through the...