" When "direst revenge swallows up every other
feeling" in the soul of Matilda, her eyes "scintillate with a
fiend-like expression." Incidents follow one another with a wild
and stupefying rapidity. Every moment is a crisis. The style is
startlingly abrupt, and the short, disconnected paragraphs are
fired off like so many pistol shots. The sequence of events is
mystifying--Zastrozzi's motive for persecuting Verezzi is darkly
concealed until the end of the story, for reasons known only to
writers of the novel of terror. Shelley's romance, in short, is
no better and perhaps even worse than that of the other disciples
of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis.
_St. Irvyne: or the Rosicrucian_ (1811), though it was written by
a "Gentleman of the University of Oxford" and not by a schoolboy,
shows slight advance on _Zastrozzi_ either in matter or manner.
The plot indeed is more bewildering and baffling than that of
_Zastrozzi_. The action of the story is double and alternate, the
scene shifts from place to place, and the characters appear and
disappear in an unaccountable and disconcerting fashion. This
time Godwin's _St. Leon_ has to be added to the list of Shelley's
sources. Ginotti, whose name is stolen from a brigand in
_Zofloya_, is not the devil but one of his sworn henchmen, who
has discovered and tasted the elixir vitae.
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