be invaded with an awful horror that gradually
prevailed over all the consolations of reason and
philosophy; nor was his heart free from the terrors of
assassination. In order to dissipate these agreeable
reveries, he had recourse to the conversation of his
guide, by whom he was entertained with the history of
divers travellers who had been robbed and murdered by
ruffians, whose retreat was in the recesses of that
very wood."[27]

The sighing of the trees, thunder and sudden flashes of lightning
add to the horror of a journey, which resembles Mrs. Radcliffe's
description of Emily's approach to Udolpho. When Count Fathom
takes refuge in a robber's hut, he discovers in his room, which
has no bolt on the inside of the door, the body of a recently
murdered man, concealed beneath some bundles of straw. Effecting
his escape by placing the corpse in his own bed to deceive the
robbers, the count is mistaken for a phantom by the old woman who
waits upon him. In carrying out his designs upon Celinda, the
count aggravates her natural timidity by relating dismal stories
of omens and apparitions, and then groans piteously outside her
door and causes the mysterious music of an Æolian harp to sound
upon the midnight air. Celinda sleeps, too, like the ill-starred
heroine of the novel of terror, "at the end of a long gallery,
scarce within hearing of any other inhabited part of the
house."[28] The scene in _Count Fathom_, in which Renaldo, at
midnight, visits, as he thinks, the tomb of Monimia, is
surrounded with circumstances of gloom and mystery:

"The uncommon darkness of the night, the solemn silence