They hurry through a savage glen, in which a
swollen torrent falls over a precipice. After hearing the crash
of falling armour, they suddenly come upon a dying knight on
whose pale features every mark of horror is depicted. Led by
frightful screams of distress, Montmorenci and his men find a
maiden, who has been captured by banditti. Montmorenci slays the
leader, but is seized by the rest of the banditti and bound to a
tree overlooking a stupendous chasm into which he is to be
hurled. By almost superhuman struggles he effects his escape,
when suddenly--there at this terror-fraught moment, the fragment
wisely ends.
In _The Abbey of Clunedale_ Drake experiments feebly and
ineffectively with the "explained supernatural" in which Mrs.
Radcliffe was an adept. The ruined abbey, deemed to be haunted,
is visited at night as an act of penance by a man named Clifford
who, in a fit of unfounded jealousy, has slain his wife's
brother. Clifford, accompanied by his sister, and bearing a
light, kneels at his wife's tomb, and is mistaken for a spectral
being.
The Gothic tale entitled _Sir Egbert_ is based on an ancient
legend associated with one of the turrets of Rochester Castle.
Sir Egbert, searching for his friend, Conrad, who had disappeared
in suspicious circumstances, hears from the Knights Templars,
that the wicked Constable is believed to hold two lovers in a
profound and deathlike sleep.
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