to distract our attention in an irritating fashion from what really interests us.  In the novel of mystery a tantalising delay may be singularly effective.  In a novel which depends chiefly for its effect on sheer horror, delays are merely dangerous.  By resting her terrors on a pseudo-scientific basis and by placing her story in a definite locality, Mrs. Shelley waives her right to an entire suspension of disbelief.  If it be reduced to its lowest terms, the plot of Frankenstein, with its bewildering confusion of the prosaic and the fantastic, sounds as crude, disjointed and inconsequent as that of a nightmare.  Mrs. Shelley’s timid hesitation between imagination and reality, her attempt to reconcile incompatible things and to place a creature who belongs to no earthly land in familiar surroundings, prevents Frankenstein from being a wholly satisfactory and alarming novel of terror.  She loves the fantastic, but she also fears it.  She is weighted down by commonsense, and so flutters instead of soaring, unwilling to trust herself far from the material world.  But the fact that she was able to vivify her grotesque skeleton of a plot with some degree of success is no mean tribute to her gifts.  The energy and vigour of her style, her complete and serious absorption in her subject, carry us safely over many an absurdity.  It is only in the duller stretches of the narrative, when her heart is not in her work, that her language becomes vague, indeterminate and blurred, and that she muffles her thoughts in words like “ascertain,” “commencement,” “peruse,” “diffuse,” instead of using their simpler Saxon equivalents.  Stirred by the excitement of the events she describes, she can write forcibly in simple, direct language.  She often frames short, hurried sentences such as a man would naturally utter when breathless with terror or with recollections of terror.  The final impression that Frankenstein leaves with us is not easy to define, because the book is so uneven in quality.  It is obviously the shapeless work of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a plot.  Sometimes it is genuinely moving and impressive, but it continually falls abruptly and ludicrously short of its aim.  Yet when all its faults have been laid bare, the fact remains that few readers would abandon the story half-way through.  Mrs. Shelley is so thoroughly engrossed in her theme that she impels her readers onward, even though they may think but meanly of her story as a work of art.

Mrs. Shelley’s second novel, Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, published in 1823, was a work on which she bestowed much care and labour, but the result proves that she writes best when the urgency of her imagination leaves her no leisure either to display her learning or adorn her style.  She herself calls Valperga a “child of mighty slow growth,” and Shelley adds that it was “raked out of fifty old books.”  Mrs. Shelley, always an industrious student, made