Florence_--all very much alike in their manners and morals--make
the heroine's journey a perilous enterprise. The romances of Mrs.
Radcliffe were rifled unscrupulously by the snappers-up of
unconsidered trifles, and many of the titles are variations on
hers. In emulation of _The Romance of the Forest_ we find George
Walker's _Romance of the Cavern_ (1792) and Miss Eleanor Sleath's
_Mysteries of the Forest_. Novelists appreciated the magnetic
charm of the word "mystery" on a title-page, and after _The
Mysteries of Udolpho_ we find such seductive names as _Mysterious
Warnings_ and _Mysterious Visits_, by Mrs. Parsons; _Horrid
Mysteries_, translated from the German of the Marquis von Grosse,
by R. Will (1796); _The Mystery of the Black Tower_ and _The
Mystic Sepulchre_, by John Palmer, a schoolmaster of Bath; _The
Mysterious Wanderer_ (1807), by Miss Sophia Reeve; _The
Mysterious Hand or Subterranean Horrors_ (1811), by A.J.
Randolph; and _The Mysterious Freebooter_ (1805), by Francis
Lathom. Castles and abbeys were so persistently haunted that Mrs.
Rachel Hunter, a severely moral writer, advertises one of her
stories as _Letitia: A Castle Without a Spectre_. Mystery slips,
almost unawares, into the domestic story. There are, for
instance, vague hints of it in Charlotte Smith's _Old Manor
House_ (1793). The author of _The Ghost_ and of _More Ghosts_
adopts the pleasing pseudonym of Felix Phantom. The gloom of
night broods over many of the stories, for we know:

"affairs that walk,
As they say spirits do, at midnight, have
In them a wilder nature than the business
That seeks despatch by day,"