“A novel now is nothing more
  Than an old castle, and a creaking door,
    A distant hovel,
  Clanking of chains—­a galley—­a light—­
  Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
    And there’s a novel.”

In The Story-Teller, a magazine which reprinted many popular tales, we find German legends like The Three Students of Goettingen, a “True Story Very Strange and Very Pitiful”; The Wood Demon; The Wehr-Wolf; The Sexton of Cologne, or Lucifer, a striking story of an Italian artist who was haunted by a terrible figure he had painted in the church at Arezzo.  Yet the first tale in the collection, The Story-Haunted, which describes the sad fate of a youth brought up in a solitary library reading romances to his mother, was intended, like The Spectre-Smitten, in Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician,[128] as a solemn warning against over-indulgence in fictitious terrors.  The mother dies in an agony of horror, as her son reads aloud the account of the Gentleman of Florence, who was pursued by a spectre of himself, which vanished with him finally into the earth, as the priest endeavoured to bless him.  The son, left alone, enters the world, and judges the people around him by the standard of books.  The story-haunted youth falls in love with the phantom of his own imagination, whom he endows with all the graces of the heroines of romance.  He finds her embodied at last, but she dies before they are united. The Romancist and Novelist’s Library, in ten volumes, contains a comprehensive selection of tales of terror by the “best authors.”  Walpole, Miss Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, Maturin, Mrs. Shelley, and Charles Brockden Brown are all represented; and there are many translations of tales by French and German authors.  We may take our choice of The Spectre Barber or The Spectre Bride, or, if we are inclined to incredulity, see The Spectre Unmasked.  The entertainment offered is of bewildering variety.  Some of the stories, such as D.F.  Hayne’s Romance of the Castle, seem like familiar, well-tried friends, and conceal no surprises for the readers of Gothic romance.  Others, like The Sleepless Woman, by W. Jerdan, are more piquant.  The hero is warned by his dying uncle to beware of women’s bright eyes.  In spite of this he marries a lady, whose eyes unite the qualities of the robin and the falcon.  After the wedding he makes the awful discovery that she is of too noble a lineage ever to sleep.  Turn where he may, her eyes are always upon him.  At last, we find him pallid, haggard, and emaciated, wandering alone in an avenue of cedar trees beside a silent lake: 

“At this moment a breath of wind blew a branch aside—­a sunbeam fell upon the baron’s face; he took it for the eyes of his wife.  Alas! his remedy lay temptingly before him, the still, the profound, the shadowy lake.  De Launaye took one plunge—­it was into eternity.”

The writer foolishly ruins the effect of this climax by super-imposing an allegorical interpretation.