noon I sat with Mrs. Barbauld, still in all the beauty of her fine taste, correct understanding, as well as pure integrity." From that time forward the entries concerning her are more frequent. He often visited her to play chess. In 1824 he writes: "Walked to Newington. Mrs. Barbauld was going out, but she stayed a short time with me. The old lady is much shrunk in appearance, and is declining in strength. She is but the shade of her former self, but a venerable shade. She is eighty-one years old, but she retains her cheerfulness, and seems not afraid of death. She has a serene hope and quiet faith-delightful qualities at all times, and in old age peculiarly enviable." A few months later she died. Her poem on "Life" was written when she was past seventy, and was the last of her works.

ANN RADCLIFFE.

(1764-1822)

ONE can hardly say that Mrs. Ann Radcliffe is a forgotten novelist, for her name, and the name of her great novel, "The Mysteries of Udolpho," are familiar to everyone at all acquainted with modern English literature. Not that many people have read the story or know much if anything about the writer, but the name of the author and the story itself stand for a particular kind of fiction. So whenever any novel bordering on the mysterious and containing scenes with ghosts and trap doors and secret passages is published it is at once classed with novels emanating a century ago of which Mrs. Radcliffe's romances stand as the type.

George Colman, writing in that elder day of romance, contrasting the fiction of his time with that of Richardson and Fielding, said:

A novel now is nothing more

Than an old castle, and a creaking door,

A distant hovel,

Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,

Old armor, and a phantom all in white-
And that's a novel.

These were the properties that Mrs. Radcliffe made famous. She took for her model Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," but greatly bettered her instruction. "The Romance of the Forest" and "The Mysteries of Udolpho" are far superior as artistic works of fiction to Walpole's novel, for the apparently supernatural events in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels are finally explained by natural causes, and this is not so with Walpole. In this art she has no rival among English writers, not even Wilkie Collins. Two Americans surpass her, Edgar A. Poe and Charles Brockden Brown. The latter was her contemporary, but is now pretty well forgotten.

Mrs. Radcliffe's maiden name was Ann Ward, and she was born in 1764. At the age of twentythree she married William Radcliffe, a student of law, who subsequently became the editor of a newspaper. Her first novel was published in 1789, but met with no success. Its name is hardly remembered. Her second book was called "A Sicilian Romance," which Sir Walter Scott says attracted much notice among the novel readers of the day and entitled Mrs. Radcliffe to

the praise of being the first to introduce into prose fiction a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive narrative which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry. She is the first poetess of romantic fiction.

It

Her next story was "the Romance of the Forest," which appeared in 1791, and is still familiar to modern readers, at least by name. has passed through many American as well as English editions, and is still to be found in all circulating libraries.

"The Mysteries of Udolpho" is the novel by which Mrs. Radcliffe is best known. It is a romance full of marvelous and thrilling adventure that sustains the interest of the reader to the end, although it is a very long, three-volume story. The heroine is Emily St. Aubert, who lives with her parents on the banks of the Garonne in the pleasant country of Gascony. Her mother dies and she

and her father make a visit to Provence. On the way they meet Valancourt, who is also traveling. He is young and attractive, and the usual result follows. Next the father dies, but before his death he charges Emily to return home and burn, without examining them, certain papers that are to be found in a secret receptacle. Then Emily's aunt, Mme. Cheron, who is her guardian, appears

and first approves and then forbids Emily's marriage with Valancourt. The aunt is married to an Italian, Signor Montoni, who is the villain of the story. The scene next shifts to Venice, and Mrs. Radcliffe displays great power in describing the beauties of the Italian landscape and the majestic buildings of the Queen of the Adriatic. The Count Morani now appears as a suitor for Emily's hand, but she refuses him, against the wishes of her uncle, Montoni, who attempts to force her into the marriage. Suddenly Signor Montoni resolves to go to his castle in the Apennines, and they all accordingly pack up and make the journey.

The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains whose long shadows stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendor upon the towers and battlements of a castle that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendor of these illumined objects was heightened by the contrasted shade which involved the valley below.

There," said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, "is Udolpho."

Then follow innumerable mysteries, and many plots are laid against Emily, but she avoids them all. At last she escapes in company with a French prisoner who has been held there, and