J.
Randolph; and _The Mysterious Freebooter_ (1805), by Francis
Lathom. Castles and abbeys were so persistently haunted that Mrs.
Rachel Hunter, a severely moral writer, advertises one of her
stories as _Letitia: A Castle Without a Spectre_. Mystery slips,
almost unawares, into the domestic story. There are, for
instance, vague hints of it in Charlotte Smith's _Old Manor
House_ (1793). The author of _The Ghost_ and of _More Ghosts_
adopts the pleasing pseudonym of Felix Phantom. The gloom of
night broods over many of the stories, for we know:
"affairs that walk,
As they say spirits do, at midnight, have
In them a wilder nature than the business
That seeks despatch by day,"
and we are confronted with titles like _Midnight Weddings_, by
Mrs. Meeke, one of Macaulay's favourite "bad-novel writers," _The
Midnight Bell_, awakening memories of Duncan's murder, by George
Walker, or _The Nocturnal Minstrel_ (1809), by Miss Sleath. These
"dismal treatises" abound in reminiscences of Mrs. Radcliffe and
of "Monk" Lewis, and many of them hark back as far as _The Castle
of Otranto_ for some of their situations. The novels of Miss
Wilkinson may perhaps serve as well as those of any of her
contemporaries to show that Scott was not unduly harsh in his
condemnation of the romances fashionable in the first decade of
the nineteenth century, when "tales of terror jostle on the
road.
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