Le Fanu, who claimed that his stories, like those of Sir
Walter Scott, belonged to the "legitimate school of English
tragic romance," was one of the best-known contributors. _All the
Year Round_ and _Household Words_, under the editorship of
Dickens, often found room for the occult and the uncanny. Wilkie
Collins' fascinating serial, _The Moonstone_, was published in
_All the Year Round_ in 1868; _The Woman in White_ had appeared
six years earlier in _Blackwood_. The stories included in these
magazines are of various types. The old-fashioned spook gradually
declines in popularity. He is ousted in a scientific age by more
recondite forms of terror. Before 1875, with a few belated
exceptions:
"Ghosts, wandering here and there
Troop home to churchyards, damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone."
The "explained supernatural" is skilfully improved and developed.
Le Fanu's _Green Tea_ is a story from the diary of a German
doctor, concerning a patient who was dogged by a black monkey.
The creature, "whose green eyes glow with an expression of
unfathomable malignity," is medically explained to be an
illusion; but it is so vividly presented that it fastens on our
imagination with remarkable tenacity.
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