A
smile seemed never to have disturbed the settled scorn
which his lips expressed; his high forehead was marked
by a thousand contradictory lines."
This terrific personage spends the last years of his life in
orthodox fashion as an austere saint in a monastery.
_The Mortal Immortal_, a variation on the theme of _St. Leon_, is
the record of a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, who drank half of the
elixir his master had compounded in the belief that it was a
potion to destroy love. It is written on his three hundred and
twenty-third birthday. _Transformation_, like _Frankenstein_,
dwells on the pathos of ugliness and deformity, but the subject
is treated rather in the spirit of an eastern fairy tale than in
that of a novel of terror. The dwarf, in return for a chest of
treasure, borrows a beautiful body, and, thus disguised, wins the
love of Juliet, and all ends happily. Mrs. Shelley's short
stories[124] reveal a stronger sense of proportion than her
novels, and are written in a more graceful, fluent style than the
books on which she expended great labour.
The literary history of Byron's fragmentary novel and of
Polidori's short story, _The Vampyre_, is somewhat tangled, but
the solution is to be found in the diary of Dr. John William
Polidori, edited and elucidated by William Michael Rossetti.
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