One of Mrs. Radcliffe's contemporaries is said to have suggested
that if she wished to transcend the horror of the Inquisition
scenes in _The Italian_ she would have to visit hell itself. Like
her own heroines, Mrs. Radcliffe had too elegant and refined an
imagination and too fearful a heart to undertake so desperate a
journey. She would have recoiled with horror from the impious
suggestion. In _Gaston de Blondeville_, written in 1802, but
published posthumously with a memoir by Noon Talfourd, she
ventures to make one or two startling innovations. Her hero is no
longer a pale, romantic young man of gentle birth, but a stolid,
worthy merchant. Here, at last, she indulges in a substantial
spectre, who cannot be explained away as the figment of a
disordered imagination, since he seriously alarms, not a solitary
heroine or a scared lady's-maid, but Henry III. himself and his
assembled barons. Yet apart from this daring escapade, it is
timidity rather than the spirit of valorous enterprise that is
urging Mrs. Radcliffe into new and untried paths. Her happy,
courageous disregard for historical accuracy in describing
far-off scenes and bygone ages has deserted her. She searches
painfully in ancient records, instead of in her imagination, for
mediaeval atmosphere.
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