horribly in their sockets.”  When “direst revenge swallows up every other feeling” in the soul of Matilda, her eyes “scintillate with a fiend-like expression.”  Incidents follow one another with a wild and stupefying rapidity.  Every moment is a crisis.  The style is startlingly abrupt, and the short, disconnected paragraphs are fired off like so many pistol shots.  The sequence of events is mystifying—­Zastrozzi’s motive for persecuting Verezzi is darkly concealed until the end of the story, for reasons known only to writers of the novel of terror.  Shelley’s romance, in short, is no better and perhaps even worse than that of the other disciples of Mrs. Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis.

St. Irvyne:  or the Rosicrucian (1811), though it was written by a “Gentleman of the University of Oxford” and not by a schoolboy, shows slight advance on Zastrozzi either in matter or manner.  The plot indeed is more bewildering and baffling than that of Zastrozzi.  The action of the story is double and alternate, the scene shifts from place to place, and the characters appear and disappear in an unaccountable and disconcerting fashion.  This time Godwin’s St. Leon has to be added to the list of Shelley’s sources.  Ginotti, whose name is stolen from a brigand in Zofloya, is not the devil but one of his sworn henchmen, who has discovered and tasted the elixir vitae.  Like Zofloya, he is surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery.  So that he may himself die, Ginotti, like the old stranger in St. Leon, is anxious to impart his secret to another.  He chooses as his victim, Wolfstein, a young noble who, like Leonardo in Zofloya, has allied himself with a band of brigands.  The bandit, Ginotti, aids Wolfstein to escape with a beautiful captive maiden, for whom Shelley adopts the name Megalena from Zofloya.  While the lovers are in Genoa, Megalena, discovering Wolfstein with a lady named Olympia, whose “character has been ruined by a false system of education,” makes him promise to murder her rival.  In Olympia’s bedchamber Wolfstein’s hand is stayed for a moment by the sight of her beauty—­a picture which recalls the powerful scene in Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian, when Schedoni bends over the sleeping Ellena.  After Olympia’s suicide, Megalena and Wolfstein flee together from Genoa.  In the tale of terror, as in the modern film-play, a flight of some kind is almost indispensable.  Ginotti, whose habit of disappearing and reappearing reminds us of the ghostly monk in the ruins of Paluzzi, tells his history to Wolfstein, and, at the destined hour, bestows the prescription for the elixir, and appoints a meeting in St. Irvyne’s abbey, where Wolfstein stumbles over the corpse of Megalena.  Wolfstein refuses to deny God.  Both Ginotti and his victim are blasted by lightning, amid which the “frightful prince of terror, borne on the pinions of hell’s sulphurous whirlwind,” stands before them.