are put to flight by a troop of aerial spirits.  Dr. Drake knew the Gothic stories of Walpole, Mrs. Barbauld, Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe; and traces of the influence of each may be found in his work.  Henry Fitzowen loves Adeline de Montfort, but has a powerful and diabolical rival—­Walleran—­whose character combines the most dangerous qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe’s villains with the magical gifts of a wizard.  Fitzowen, not long before the day fixed for his wedding, is led astray, while hunting, by an elusive stag, a spectral monk and a “wandering fire,” and arrives home in a thunderstorm to find his castle enveloped in total darkness and two of his servants stretched dead at his feet.  He learns from his mother and sister, who are shut in a distant room, that Adeline has been carried off by armed ruffians.  Believing Walleran to be responsible for this outrage, Fitzowen sets out the next day in search of him.  After weary wanderings he is beguiled into a Gothic castle by a foul witch, who resembles one of Spenser’s loathly hags, and on his entrance hears peals of diabolical laughter.  He sees spectres, blue lights, and the corpse of Horror herself.  When he slays Walleran the enchantments disappear.  At the end of a winding passage he finds a cavern illuminated by a globe of light, and discovers Adeline asleep on a couch.  He awakes her with a kiss.  Thunder shakes the earth, a raging whirlwind tears the castle from its foundations, and the lovers awake from their trance in a beautiful, moonlit vale where they hear enchanting music and see knights, nymphs and spirits.  A beauteous queen tells them that the spirits of the blest have freed them from Horror’s dread agents.  The music dies away, the spirits flee and the lovers find themselves in a country road.  A story of the same type is told by De La Motte Fouque in The Field of Terror.[33] Before the steadfast courage of the labourer who strives to till the field, diabolical enchantments disappear.  It is an ancient legend turned into moral allegory.

In the essay on Objects of Terror, which precedes Montmorenci, a Fragment, Drake discusses that type of terror, which is “excited by the interference of a simple, material causation,” and which “requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to prevent its operating more pain than pleasure.”  He condemns Walpole’s Mysterious Mother on the ground that the catastrophe is only productive of horror and aversion, and regards the old ballad, Edward, as intolerable to any person of sensibility, but praises Dante and Shakespeare for keeping within the “bounds of salutary and grateful pleasure.”  The scene in The Italian, where Schedoni, about to plunge a dagger into Ellena’s bosom, recoils, in the belief that he has discovered her to be his own daughter, is commended as “appalling yet delighting the reader.”  In the productions of Mrs. Radcliffe, “the Shakespeare of Romance Writers, who to the wild landscape of Salvator Rosa has added the softer graces of a Claude,” he declares,