Drake, like Mrs. Barbauld
and her brother, was deeply interested in the sources of the
pleasure derived from tales of terror, and wrote his Gothic
stories to confirm and illustrate the theories propounded in his
essays. He discusses gravely and learnedly the kinds of
fictitious horror that excite agreeable sensations, and then
proceeds to arrange carefully calculated effects, designed to
alarm his readers, but not to outrage their sense of decorum. He
has none of the reckless daring of "Monk" Lewis, who flung
restraint to the winds and raced in mad career through an orgy of
horrors. In his enchanted castles we are disturbed by an uneasy
suspicion that the inhabitants are merely allegorical characters,
and that the spectre of a moral lurks in some dim recess ready to
spring out upon us suddenly. Dr. Drake's mind was as a house
divided against itself: he was a moralist, emulating the "sage
and serious Spenser" in his desire to exalt virtue and abase
vice, he was a critic working out, with calm detachment,
practical illustrations of the theories he had formulated, and he
was a romantic enthusiast, imbued with a vague but genuine
admiration for the wild superstitions of a bygone age. His
stories exhibit painful evidence of the conflict which waged
between the three sides of his nature.
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