“The Mysteries of Udolpho,” Mrs. Radcliffe’s next and most celebrated work, is not (in the judgment of this reader, at least) her masterpiece.  The booksellers paid her what Scott, erroneously, calls “the unprecedented sum of 500 pounds” for the romance, and they must have made a profitable bargain.  “The public,” says Scott, “rushed upon it with all the eagerness of curiosity, and rose from it with unsated appetite.”  I arise with a thoroughly sated appetite from the “Mysteries of Udolpho.”  The book, as Sir Walter saw, is “The Romance of the Forest” raised to a higher power.  We have a similar and similarly situated heroine, cruelly detached from her young man, and immured in a howling wilderness of a brigand castle in the Apennines.  In place of the Marquis is a miscreant on a larger and more ferocious scale.  The usual mysteries of voices, lights, secret passages, and innumerable doors are provided regardless of economy.  The great question, which I shall not answer, is, what did the Black Veil conceal? Not “the bones of Laurentina,” as Catherine Morland supposed.

Here is Emily’s adventure with the veil.  “She paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall—­perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture, and before she could leave the chamber she dropped senseless on the floor.  When she recovered her recollection, . . . horror occupied her mind.”  Countless mysteries coagulate around this veil, and the reader is apt to be disappointed when the awful curtain is withdrawn.  But he has enjoyed, for several hundred pages, the pleasures of anticipation.  A pedantic censor may remark that, while the date of the story is 1580, all the virtuous people live in an idyllic fashion, like creatures of Rousseau, existing solely for landscape and the affections, writing poetry on Nature, animate and inanimate, including the common Bat, and drawing in water colours.  In those elegant avocations began, and in these, after an interval of adventures “amazing horrid,” concluded the career of Emily.

Mrs. Radcliffe keeps the many entangled threads of her complex web well in hand, and incidents which puzzle you at the beginning fall naturally into place before the end.  The character of the heroine’s silly, vain, unkind, and unreasonable aunt is vividly designed (that Emily should mistake the corse of a moustached bandit for that of her aunt is an incident hard to defend).  Valancourt is not an ordinary spotless hero, but sows his wild oats, and reaps the usual harvest; and Annette is a good sample of the usual soubrette.  When one has said that the landscapes and bandits of this romance are worthy of Poussin and Salvator Rosa, from whom they were probably translated into words, not much remains to be added.  Sir Walter, after repeated perusals, considered “Udolpho” “a step beyond Mrs. Radcliffe’s former work, high as that had justly advanced her.”  But he admits that