When Walpole wrote disparagingly of Clara Reeve's imitation of
his Gothic story, he singled out for praise a fragment which he
attributes to Mrs. Barbauld. The story to which he alludes is
evidently the unfinished _Sir Bertrand_, which is contained in
one of the volumes entitled _Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose_,
published jointly by J. and A.L. Aikin in 1773, and preceded by
an essay _On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror_. Leigh
Hunt, who reprinted _Sir Bertrand_, which had impressed him very
strongly in his boyhood, in his _Book for a Corner_ (1849)
ascribes the authorship of the tale to Dr. Aikin, commenting on
the fact that he was "a writer from whom this effusion was hardly
to have been looked for." It is probably safe to assume that
Walpole, who was a contemporary of the Aikins and who took a
lively interest in the literary gossip of the day, was right in
assigning _Sir Bertrand_ to Miss Aikin,[31] afterwards Mrs.
Barbauld, though the story is not included in _The Works of Anne
Letitia Barbauld_, edited by Miss Lucy Aikin in 1825. That the
minds of the Aikins were exercised about the sources of pleasure
in romance, especially when connected with horror and distress,
is clear not only from this essay and the illustrative fragment
but also from other essays and stories in the same
collection--_On Romances, an Imitation_, and _An Enquiry into
those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations_. In
the preliminary essay to _Sir Bertrand_ an attempt is made to
explain why terrible scenes excite pleasurable emotions and to
distinguish between two different types of horror, as illustrated
by _The Castle of Otranto_, which unites the marvellous and the
terrible, and by a scene of mere natural horror in Smollett's
_Count Fathom_. The story _Sir Bertrand_ is an attempt to combine
the two kinds of horror in one composition. A knight, wandering