One way to an appreciation of the talent of Regina Roche is to pass from " Clermont" to the two pseudo-German stories by Mrs. Parsons: "The Castle of Wolfenbach " (1793) and “ The Mysterious Warning" (1796). These books bear out Professor Oliver Elton's statement that the minor Gothic novelists have no style of their own but a sort of "group-style," as though they were writing mechanically to pattern and according to models approved and consecrated by public favour. Certainly one may without fear of injustice accuse Mrs. Parsons of the cynicism which gives to the public what the public craves. In others of her books-notably in " Woman as She Should Be ” (1793), and in "Women as They Are" (1796), amusing counterparts to the brilliant satires on men, by Robert Bage*—she shows a sceptical wit and a capacity for trenchant criticism of her time; but in the "German Stories" selected by Jane Austen, she is too occupied with terror and with Gothistic décor to allow herself much realism. Here and there she betrays personal pre-occupations or prejudice. The type of carefully genial hypocrite so surely attracts her when drawing her principal villains, that one suspects an element of actual experience; she is a militant protestant with the strongest disapprobation for Jesuits and for monastic life; above all, her portraiture of mature ladies of the upper-middle class has the sureness of familiarity. But the few passages which betray the authoress' gift for downright if astringent characterfiction are so thronged about with the paraphernalia of a terror novel-with cases of mysterious parentage, with horrid crimes, with "death embraces" and "children of misfortune," with swoons, with pallid gallantry, with lips which are sealed by some unhappy secret-that one turns embarrassed from the sight of them, as from bare patches where the basic texture of a wellworn carpet shows through the once luxuriant pile.

Mrs. Parsons' terrorism is further revealed as a mere modishness by her rather contemptuous explanation of all apparently supernatural happenings. Regina Roche, though she did not tolerate actual ghosts, undoubtedly thrilled with her own heroines; but Mrs. Parsons-coldly violent in scenes of almost sadistic cruelty seems to mock even at herself. Not surprisingly, her

*"Man as He Is " (1792) and " Hermsprong or Man as He Is Not "

(1796).

habit of giving deliberately trivial interpretations of pseudoghostly phenomena robs her romances of their power to terrify, and while she was undoubtedly in herself a woman of much more humour and of better sense than Mrs. Roche, she was very inferior as a Gothic novelist.

"The Orphan of the Rhine " is the only one of the Northanger Novels of which I am compelled to speak without a reader's knowledge. Long and determined efforts have failed to trace a single copy. There is, however, sufficient evidence of its quality to justify its grouping among the pseudo-German stories. The book was written by one Eleanor Sleath and published in 1798.. The authoress followed it with "Who's the Murderer? or The Mysteries of the Forest " (1802), “The Bristol Heiress " (1808), and "The Nocturnal Minstrel, or The Spirit of the Wood (1809). One may fairly assume, from such a bibliography, that Miss Sleath was of the Radcliffian school and wrote stories of the approved forest-clad type, staging them wherever a likely landscape seemed to offer. There is no reason to suspect her of having translated “The Orphan of the Rhine," and I have no doubt that, when at last a copy does come to light, we shall find the Rhenish background of the orphan's adventures to be such as might be conjured by a lady of fierce imagination living in Twickenham.

"The Midnight Bell," by Francis Lathom, is, from the point of view of title, almost a Gothic masterpiece. But unluckily the book itself cannot maintain the standard of its superscription. Indeed it is to be feared that the entitlement was a mere device for penny-catching. The "Bell" is a signal for the nightly gathering of rascally monks in a ruined castle, where are kept stolen wealth and other improprieties, but it does not toll at all until the middle of the third and last volume, the earlier and major part of the novel being a melodramatic account of the adventures of Alphonsus (good Gothistic name) in search-as usual of his estates and of the secret of his birth. "The Midnight Bell is described as "a German Story," and German in setting and in the nomenclature of its counts and castles it certainly is; but the author was an Englishman and a very witty and ingenious Englishman, although being a person of quality and therefore inclined to idleness, he never worked harder at novel-writing than was necessary to earn a living, and that was not hard enough to do his genuine talents justice.

Lathom began a career of authorship in 1794 with a romance, "The Castle of Ollada," following it up with a farcical comedy entitled "All in a Bustle." "The Midnight Bell " was his third work and second romance, and was published anonymously in 1798.

It would perhaps be unreasonable to quote the quality of Lathom's later work against "The Midnight Bell"; but certainly to anyone who comes to it after reading “Men and Manners" (the novel which was published a year later) it is queerly disappointing. Clumsy in construction; humourless; and as mechanically a novel of suspense (each of the two first volumes ends with unexplained sensation) as ever was serial in a modern daily paper, the book is like the work of a different person altogether.

As indeed from one point of view it was. Lathom's real talent -like that of Mrs. Parsons-was for contemporary satire; he gothicised" half to boil the pot, half to indulge his private sense of humour. Wherefore such books as " Men and Manners and "Human Beings" (1807) have the light-heartedness of a writer using a natural talent, but the "tales of terror " from " The Midnight Bell" to "Italian Mysteries" (1820) are cynical exercises in an assumed manner, and wear their trappings with the false solemnity of a knight in armour at a modern costume ball.

The only chapters in the novel "The Midnight Bell" that hold the attention of the modern reader (always excepting the few to whom Gothicism is of itself an allurement, who relish even the fatuities of the school) are those describing the imprisonment of Alphonsus in the Bastille and his escape from its walls. These chapters have the realism of fact, and one is tempted to wonder whether Lathom was not actually in Paris during the early stages of the Revolution—a surmise encouraged by the fact that in 1803 he published a translation of a French work describing the transformation of the Tuileries at the hands of the Jacobins.

"The Necromancer of the Black Forest" stands half-way between the sham Teutonism of Mrs. Parsons and Lathom, and the real Teutonism of "Horrid Mysteries." It is certainly in great part a translation from the German; phrases betray its linguistic origin. But whereas the first edition of 1794 declares the work to be a translation by Peter Teuthold from the original of L. Flammenberg, the records of past German authorship show no trace of any Flammenberg, and the book itself is so formless as

to make a single Teutonic original almost unimaginable. More probably it represents an adaptation, according to the English taste, of an anthology of Black Forest legends. This Flammenberg was perhaps an antiquary or even an ingenious bookseller of Freiburg, who had compiled a collection of terrific local tales. From these a selection was made, loosely strung together, and Englished by Teuthold. With such an origin" The Necromancer" would naturally be what it is, a conglomerate of violent episodes thrown loosely together and not always achieving even a semblance of logical sequence. For magniloquent descriptions of "horrid " episodes, for sheer stylistic fervour in the handling of the quasisupernatural, the work can rank high among its contemporaries; but as a novel it is a failure and, in likelihood, because in origin it was not a novel at all.

The last-and in some ways the most interesting-of the Northanger Novels is "Horrid Mysteries." This book, published in 1796, has authentic German ancestry, being a translation of the so-called "Memoirs of the Marquis of Grosse" by a German writer, Karl Grosse, who published several works between 1796 and 1800. His marquisate was apparently self-bestowed, and as an alias he used sometimes the name Marquis of Pharnusa." Though these " Memoirs " are beyond doubt mainly fictional, the book has a strong actuality interest, for it deals at length (resembling in this Schiller's drama of " The Ghost Seer ") with the international intrigues of the sect of Illuminati, whose savage activities, subversive doctrines and close relations with freemasonry are fully described by Mrs. Nesta Webster in her study of "World Revolution." To this pre-occupation with the crimes of Spartacus Weishaupt and his followers, "Horrid Mysteries" owes a second mention in the work of a contemporary and important author. In chapter ii of Peacock's "Nightmare Abbey " we read: "Mr. Glowry slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves."

The hero of "Horrid Mysteries" falls into the clutches of this secret society and, because he cannot help himself, swears the oath and assists at the awful gatherings which diverted the sleeping Glowry. He learns that the conspirators are political revolutionaries who decree death to royal persons; that they are social anarchists who deny all civic responsibility and even the

ties of family; that they believe in communising alike women and wealth; that they enlist in their service the knife of the assassin, the terrors of religion and the wiles of wanton beauty. Through four volumes the Marquis of G. . . . . seeks to escape and to destroy the evil conspiracy in which he is involved. He travels all the countries of Western Europe; he organizes a Fascist band to oppose the schemes of the Illuminati; he is continually thwarted by their far-reaching power, brought back to submission, threatened, made the victim of attempted murder. The resultin English at least is a strange wild work, dealing unashamedly in the supernatural, written with a lurid, if inconsequent power. An ultra-Poësque tale of terror, told in 200,000 feverish words and illustrated by Gustave Doré in one of his rare but undeniable moments of nightmare genius, would be just such a terrific monstrosity. There is life-story within life-story; the reader seems to assist at a series of apocalyptic visions, which by their sheer opulence of language crush him into gibbering acquiescence. Whatever there may be of folly and even of madness in this extraordinary work, there is also power. "Horrid Mysteries" is surely the most potent Schauer-roman of them all; certainly in its English version it is the most defiantly fantastic of any novel of the period that I have read.

From the fortunate variety of the Northanger Novels it has been possible to illustrate certain general principles of the Gothic romance. The origins of the movement have been recognised as genuine spiritual origins; the lines along which it developed and the excesses of which it was guilty appear, the former to have been inevitable, the latter-granted the instinct to liberty which inspired the whole-to have been at least logical. It remains to enquire where, when its great days were over, the Gothic romance took refuge; and secondly why, seeing that the Northanger Novels bear-if only indirectly on Jane Austen's literary experience, they have hitherto only been very cursorily examined.*

*cf. Rev. Montagu Summers' paper on "Anne Radcliffe " (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature. Vol. xxxv, pp. 39-77) and his letter in The Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 27, 1917); also Miss Scarborough, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction" (1917) and Miss Edith Birkhead, "The Tale of Terror" (1921).