of St. Clair, or The Spectre of the Murdered Nun_; _The Convent
of the Grey Penitents, or The Apostate Nun_. Perchance, he found
there Mrs. Henrietta Rouvière's romance, (published in the same
year as _Montorio_,) _A Peep at our Ancestors_ (1807), describing
the reign of King Stephen. Mrs. Rouvière, in her preface,

"flatters herself that, aided by records and documents,
she may have succeeded in a correct though faint sketch
of the times she treats, and in affording, if through a
dim yet not distorted nor discoloured glass, A Peep at
our Ancestors";

but her story is entirely devoid of the colour with which Mrs.
Radcliffe, her model, contrived to decorate the past. It is,
moreover, written in a style so opaque that it obscures her
images from view as effectually as a piece of ground glass. To
describe the approach of twilight--an hour beloved by writers of
romance--she attempts a turgid paraphrase of Gray's Elegy:

"The grey shades of an autumnal evening gradually stole
over the horizon, progressively throwing a duskier hue
on the surrounding objects till glimmering confusion
encompassing the earth shut from the accustomed eye the
well-known view, leaving conjecture to mark its
boundaries."

The adventures of Adelaide and her lover, Walter of Gloucester,
are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to
"leave to conjecture" their interminable vicissitudes. The names
of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may