by bitter experience to distrust Mrs. Radcliffe's secrets and to
look for ultimate disillusionment. The uncanny voice that
ominously echoes Montoni's words is not the cry of a bodiless
visitant striving to awaken "that blushing, shamefaced spirit
that mutinies in a man's bosom," but belongs to an ordinary human
being, the prisoner Du Pont, who has discovered one of Mrs.
Radcliffe's innumerable concealed passages. The bed with the
black velvet pall in the haunted chamber contains, not the
frightful apparition that flashed upon the inward eye of Emily
and of Annette, but a stalwart pirate who shrinks from discovery.
The gliding forms which steal furtively along the ramparts and
disappear at the end of dark passages become eventually, like the
nun in Charlotte Bronte's _Villette_, sensible to feeling as to
sight. The unearthly music which is heard in the woods at
midnight proceeds, not from the inhabitants of another sphere,
but from a conscience stricken nun with a lurid past. The corpse,
which Emily believed to be that of her aunt, foully done to death
by a pitiless husband, is the body of a man killed in a bandit's
affray. Here Mrs. Radcliffe seems eager to show that she was not
afraid of a corpse, but is careful that it shall not be the
corpse which the reader anticipates. She deliberately excites
trembling apprehensions in order that she may show how absurd
they are. We are befooled that she may enjoy a quietly malicious
triumph. The result is that we become wary and cautious. The
genuine ghost story, read by Ludovico to revive his fainting
spirits when he is keeping vigil in the "haunted" chamber, is
robbed of its effect because we half expect to be disillusioned
ere the close. It is far more impressive if read as a separate
story apart from its setting. The idea of explaining away what is
apparently supernatural may have occurred to Mrs. Radcliffe after