the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a “melancholy purple tint” steals up the slopes to its foundations—­are all in the day’s work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair to say that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well.  The “high canopied tester of dark green damask” and the “counterpane of black velvet” which illustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall in Chateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now:  but, once more, they were not so then.  And this faculty of description (which, as noted above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got from books, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately, got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways—­touches of really or supposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, or of appeals to the other senses—­hints of all sorts, which were to become common tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.

At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in others—­the result of what the French vividly call enfisting the reader—­getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant fashion.  The mechanism was often too mechanical:  taken with the author’s steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous to us.  With the proviso of valeat quantum, it is not quite unfair to dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of Mrs. Radcliffe’s terrormongering—­the famous incident of the Black Veil—­is produced by a piece of wax-work.  But the result resulted—­the effect was produced:  and it was left to those who were clever enough to improve upon the means.  For the time these means were “improved upon” in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intended and unintended, later.  For the present we may turn to other varieties of the curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of the century, and especially of the very last.

If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland’s Henry (1795) in the fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary to notice “Sir Fretful Plagiary’s” contributions to the subject of our history.  He preluded it with another, Arundel (1789), and followed it much later with a third, John de Lancaster:  but there is no need to say anything of these. Henry displays the odd hit-and-miss quality which seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether as novelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else.  It is, though by no means a mere “plagiarism,” an obvious and avowed imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his pastiche that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equal oblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly two generations