These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly diffused and kept up.  Very little that is terrible actually happens:  but the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar) in persuading you that something very terrible is going to happen, or has just happened.  And so the delight of something “horrid,” as the Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business.  In one sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical examination:  for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing.  But these “ados” are most cunningly made (her last book, The Italian, is, perhaps, the best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe’s great praise is that she induced her original readers to suspend their critical faculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously.  Scott, who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius:  and modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much real delectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive and many more indirect and comparative merits.  The influence on Scott is not the least of these:  but there is even a more unquestionable asset of the same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byron himself, is Mrs. Radcliffe’s work.  Schedoni did much more than beget or pattern Lara:  he is Lara, to all intents and purposes, in “first state” and before the final touch has been put by the greater master who took the plate in hand.

But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this.  Her “explained supernatural,” tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays, is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity:  and this same quality extends to her plots generally.  The historical side of her novels (which she does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kind was before Scott:  that we may leave till we come to Scott himself.  But one important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion which had never been managed before, and that is elaborate description.  She shows an early adaptation of that “picturesque,” of which we see the beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was being directly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her Travels, she had got not merely from books, but from her own observation.  She applies it both within and without:  at one moment giving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on the furniture of her abbeys and castles.  The pine forests and the cataracts;