[219.] Mrs. Radcliffe's best work is the Mysteries of Udolpho. This is the story of a tender heroine shut up in a gloomy castle. Over her broods the terrible shadow of an ancestor's crime. There are the usual "goose-flesh" accompaniments of haunted rooms, secret doors, sliding panels, mysterious figures behind old pictures, and a subterranean passage leading to a vault, dark and creepy as a tomb. Here the heroine finds a chest with blood-stained papers. By the light of a flickering candle she reads, with chills and shivering, the record of long-buried crimes. At the psychologic moment the little candle suddenly goes out. Then out of the darkness a cold, clammy hand--ugh! Foolish as such stories seem to us now, they show, first, a wild reaction from the skepticism of the preceding age; and second, a development of the mediæval romance of adventure; only the adventure is here inward rather than outward. It faces a ghost instead of a dragon; and for this work a nun with her beads is better than a knight in armor. So heroines abound, instead of heroes. The age was too educated for medieval monsters and magic, but not educated enough to reject ghosts and other bogeys.
[220.] The Lyrical Ballads were better appreciated in America than in England. The first edition was printed here in 1802.
[221.] The Prelude was not published till after Wordsworth's death, nearly half a century later.
[222.] The Prelude, Book IV.
[223.] Dowden's Selections from Wordsworth is the best of many such collections. See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of this chapter.
[224.] See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in Essays of Elia.
[225.] See Scott's criticism of his own work, in comparison with Jane Austen's, p. 439.
[226.] Scott's novels were not the first to have an historical basis. For thirty years preceding the appearance of Waverley, historical romances were popular; but it was due to Scott's genius that the historical novel became a permanent type of literature. See Cross, The Development of the English Novel.
[227.] See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of this chapter.
[228.] Shelley undoubtedly took his idea from a lost drama of Aeschylus, a sequel to Prometheus Bound, in which the great friend of mankind was unchained from a precipice, where he had been placed by the tyrant Zeus.