[14] Since the text was written—­indeed very recently—­the long-missing “Episodes” of Vathek itself have been at length supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville.  They are not “better than Vathek,” but they are good.

Still, Vatheks are not to be had to order:  and as Romance was wanted, to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century, some other kind had to be supplied.  The chief accredited purveyors of it have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel, now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of the eighteenth century.

It is, however, unjust to put the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho and the author of The Monk on the same level.  Mat Lewis was a clever boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and no faculty of self-criticism to correct it.  The famous Monk (1795), which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as Otranto and adds to its preposterousness a haut gout of atrocity and indecency which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of letters, to attempt or to tolerate.  Lewis’s other work in various forms is less offensive:  but—­except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not here concern us—­hardly any of it is literature.  What does concern us is that the time took it for literature, because it adopted the terror-style in fiction.

Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his wife’s hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of principle very contrary to his practice.  The first was to observe strict “propriety” in her books—­a point in which the novel had always been a little peccant.  The second and more questionable, but also more original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German adoption of it, but never to allow anything really supernatural in ultimate explanation or want of explanation.  She applied these two principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the same story—­the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and her final deliverance from them.  Her first attempt, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, appeared as early as 1789:  and she left a posthumous romance, Gaston de Blondeville, which did not come out till 1826, four years after her death.  She also wrote some poems and a volume of Travels (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed presently.  But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), the world-renowned Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794-1795, and The Italian two years later.