When he kisses her, the whole building falls asunder
with a crash. Sir Bertrand is thrown into a trance and awakes in
a gorgeous room, where he sees a beautiful lady who thanks him as
her deliverer. At a banquet, nymphs place a laurel wreath on his
head, but as the lady is about to address him the fragment breaks
off.
The architecture of the castle, with its gallery, staircase and
subterranean vaults, closely resembles that of Walpole's Gothic
structure. The "enormous sabres" too are familiar to readers of
_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.
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