_The Castle of Otranto_. The gliding light, disquieting at the
outset of the story but before the close familiar grown, is
doomed to be the guide of many a distressed wanderer through the
Gothic labyrinths of later romances. Mrs. Barbauld chose her
properties with admirable discretion, but lacked the art to use
them cunningly. A tolling bell, heard in the silence and darkness
of a lonely moor, will quicken the beatings of the heart, but
employed as a prompter's signal to herald the advance of a group
of black statues is only absurd. After the grimly suggestive
opening, the story gradually loses in power as it proceeds and
the happy ending, which wings our thoughts back to the Sleeping
Beauty of childhood, is wholly incongruous. If the fragment had
ended abruptly at the moment when the lady arises in her shroud
from the coffin, _Sir Bertrand_ would have been a more effective
tale of terror. From the historical point of view Mrs. Barbauld's
curious patchwork is full of interest. She seems to be reaching
out wistfully towards the mysterious and the unknown. Genuinely
anxious to awaken a thrill of excitement in the breast of her
reader, she is hesitating and uncertain as to the best way of
winning her effect. She is but a pioneer in the art of freezing
the blood and it were idle to expect that she should rush boldly
into a forest of horrors. Naturally she prefers to follow the
tracks trodden by Walpole and Smollett; but with intuitive
foresight she seems to have realised the limitations of Walpole's
marvellous machinery, and to have attempted to explore the
regions of the fearful unknown. Her opening scene works on that
instinctive terror of the dark and the unseen, upon which Mrs.
Radcliffe bases many of her most moving incidents.

Among the _Poetical Sketches_ of Blake, written between 1768 and