The Tale of Terror

e of the century we may trace, in the conversations of Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, symptoms of a longing for mo

e five pages of a short story as much sensation as was contained in the five volumes of a Gothic romance. For the brevity of the tales, which were issued in chapbooks, readers were compensated by gaudily coloured illustrations and by double-barrelled titles. An anthology called "Wild Roses" (published by Anne Lemoine, Coleman Street, n.d.) included: Twelve O'Clock or the Three Robbers, The Monks of Cluny, or Castle Acre Monastery, The Tomb of Aurora, or The Mysterious Summons, The Mysterious Spaniard, or The Ruins of St. Luke's Abbey, and lastly, as a bonne bouche, Barbastal, or The Magician of the Forest of the Bloody Ash.[127] There are many collec

tmas number. In his search after novelty he was often driven to wild and desperate expedients. Leigh Hunt, who showed scant sympathy with Lewis's bleeding nun and scoffed mercilessly at his "little grey men who sit munching hearts," was bound to admit: "A man who does not contribute his quota of grim story, now-a-days, seems hardly to be free of

en and Knocking G

pusas on one leg,

, and Horrid Eyes

ntive Heads and Sh

s of Shape and Th

ove peop

ndys' commentary on Ovid. Leigh Hunt's story has the air of having been written by on

d when we are weary of dark intrigues and impenetrable secrets we may turn to lighter reading. Yet it is significant of the taste of our ancestors that we cannot venture far without encountering a spectre of some sor

now is no

astle, and a

tant

chains-a gal

nd a phantom

re's a

by a spectre of himself, which vanished with him finally into the earth, as the priest endeavoured to bless him. The son, left alone, enters the world, and judges the people around him by the standard of books. The story-haunted youth falls in love with the phantom of his own imagination, whom he endows with all the graces of the heroines of romance. He finds her embodied at last, but she dies before they are united. The Romancist and Novelist's Library, in ten volumes, contains a comprehensive selection of tales of terror by the "best authors." Walpole, Miss Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Maturin, Mrs. Shelley, and Charles Brockden Brown are all represented; and there are many translations of tales by French and German authors. We may take our choice of The Spectre Barber or The

e; he took it for the eyes of his wife. Alas! his remedy lay temptingly before him, the

fect of this climax by super-impo

he Romancist and Novelis

when doors

wood-wor

death-wa

r has a fl

t's in the

ket floats

housebea

foot u

on the gar

ocks slip

sensational cast. Le Fanu, who claimed that his stories, like those of Sir Walter Scott, belonged to the "legitimate school of English tragic romance," was one of the best-known contributors. All the Year Round and Household Words, under the editorship of Dickens, often found room for the occult and the uncanny. Wilkie Collins' fascinating serial, Th

ndering her

hurchyards, dam

ways and floo

heir wormy b

ded in the series called After Dark, is another experiment in the same kind. A jealous woman appears among the dancers at a ball, wearing a waxen cast of the face of the man's dead wife. The short story, in which the author deliberately shakes our nerves and then soothes away our fears by accounting naturally for startling phenomena, is an amazingly popular type. It reappears continually in different guises. Occasionally it merges into pleasant buffoon

, and would have shown us the devil in his own person. Cunningham wisely keeps ashore, and repeats the tales that are told concerning the fiendish mirth and revelry to be heard, when, at certain seasons of the year, they arise in their former beauty, with forecastle and deck, with sail and pennon and shroud. James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, who was a friend of Cunningham, was steeped in the same folk-lore. The Mysterious Bride, printed among his Tales and Sketches, tells of a beautiful spirit-lady, dressed in white and green, who appears three times on St. Lawrence's Eve to the Laird of Birkendelly. On the morning, after the night on which she had promised to wed him, he is found, a blackened corpse, on Birky Brow. Mary Burnet is the story of a maiden who is drowned when keeping tryst with her lover. She returns to earth, like Kilmeny, and assures her parents of her welfare. A demon woman, whose form r

wrought. The tale is told in the rambling, circumstantial style, suitable to the fireside and the long leisure of a winter's evening. Dickens tells a very different nurse's story in one of the chapters of An Uncommercial Traveller. The tone of Mrs. Gaskell's nurse is kindly and protective; that of Dickens' nurse severe, admonitory and emphatic. She, who told the grim legend of Captain Murderer, meant, clearly, to scare as well as to entertain her hearer. She leads up to the climax of her story, the deadly revenge of the dark twin's poisoned pie, with admirable art. The nurse's name was Mercy, but, as Dickens remarks, she showed none to him. Though Dickens shrank timorously in childhood from her frightful stories, he himself, like the fat boy in Pickwick, sometimes "wants to make our flesh creep." It seems, indeed, an odd trait of the humorist that he can at will wholly discard his gaiety, and, like the Pied Piper, pipe to another measure. W.W. Jacobs, besides his humorous sailor yarns, has given us The Mo

d as, one by one, the windows of the iron dungeon disappear, until, at last, the massive walls and ponderous roof contract into the victim's iron shroud. Wilkie Collins' story, A Terribly Strange Bed, which describes the stratagem of a gang of cardsharpers for getting rid of those who happen to win money from them, is in the same vein. The canopy slowly descends during the night, and smothers its victim. A similar motive is used, with immeasurably finer effect, by Joseph Conrad in his story of the disappearance of the sailor at the lonely inn in the mountains of Spain. The experience of Byrne in The Inn of the Two Witches[129] is a masterpiece in the psychology of terror. The dense darkne

ecall the tapping of the blind man's stick in Treasure Island, the scene with the candles in the snow after the duel between the two brothers in The Master of Ballantrae, or David Balfour's perilous adventure on the broken staircase in Kidnapped. Kipling is another expert in the art of eeriness, a

l replace the Gothic machinery of ruined abbeys and wandering lights. The possibilities of terror are manifold, and it is impracticable here to do more than pick up a few threads in the tangled skein. Terror becomes inextricably interwoven with other motives according