that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, "which possess
charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and
gay, the gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be
dismissed with a sneer by people who have never read
them. Following Horace Walpole in some degree, Mrs.
Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin,
Lewis, and Charlotte Brontë, just as Miss Burney filled
the gap between Smollett and Miss Austen. Mrs.
Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance burning
much more steadily than the lamps which, in her novels,
are always blown out, in the moment of excited appre-
hension, by the night wind walking in the dank corridors
of haunted abbeys. But mark the cruelty of an in-
tellectual parent! Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe's
father in the spirit. Yet, on September 4, 1794, he
wrote to Lady Ossory: "I have read some of the de-
scriptive verbose tales, of which your Ladyship says I
was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and
Mrs. Radcliffe?). "All I can say for myself is that I
do not think my concubines have produced issue more
natural for excluding the aid of anything marvellous."

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