Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or the south of France; she divined the scenery of her romances from pictures and descriptions at second hand.  But she accompanied her husband in excursions to the Lakes and other parts of England, and in 1794 made the tour of the Rhine.[25] The passages in her diary, recording these travels, are much superior in the truthfulness and local color of their nature sketching to anything in her novels.  Mrs. Radcliffe is furthermore to be credited with a certain skill in producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon in the armory of the romanticists, mystery.  If she did not invent a new shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the old-fashioned ghost story.  She creates in her readers a feeling of impending danger, suspense, foreboding.  There is a sense of unearthly presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous; echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners, whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the gusts of wind.[26] The heroine is afraid to look in the glass lest she should see another face there beside her own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the dark just as she is coming to the critical point in the manuscript which she has found in an old chest, etc., etc., But the tale loses its impressiveness as soon as it strays beyond the shade of the battlements.  The Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the nucleus of the story.

Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, though they are the weakest of the series, have a special interest for us as affording points of comparison with the Waverly novels.  “The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne” is the narrative of a feud between two Highland clans, and its scene is the northeastern coast of Scotland, “in the most romantic part of the Highlands,” where the castle of Athlin—­like Uhland’s “Schloss am Meer”—­stood “on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea.”  This was a fine place for storms.  “The winds burst in sudden squalls over the deep and dashed the foaming waves against the rocks with inconceivable fury.  The spray, notwithstanding the high situation of the castle, flew up with violence against the windows. . .  The moon shone faintly by intervals, through broken clouds, upon the waters, illumining the white foam which burst around. . .  The surges broke on the distant shores in deep resounding murmurs, and the solemn pauses between the stormy gusts filled the mind with enthusiastic awe.”  Perhaps the description slightly reminds of the picture, in “Marmion,” of Tantallon Castle, the hold of the Red Douglases on the German Ocean, a little north of Berwick, whose frowning towers have recently done duty again in Stevenson’s “David Balfour.”  The period of the action is but vaguely indicated; but, as the weapons used in the attack on the castle are bows and arrows, we may regard the book as mediaeval in intention.  Scott says