learn how easy it was to write a book. Already Hannah More had bewailed the ever increasing number of novelists, "their unparalleled fecundity," and "the frightful facility of this species of composition." What would she think if she were living now, and could see over a thousand novels published every year in England? Already Mrs. Radcliffe had woven around English hearths the spell of her rather feeble terrors, and young and old shuddered and quaked in the subterranean corridors of castles amid the gloomy Apennines. Why a quiet, cheerful, retiring woman like Mrs. Radcliffe, who hated notoriety, and who loved country life, and afternoon drives, and all that was comfortable and commonplace, should have written "The Mysteries of Udolpho" passes our comprehension; but write it she did, and England received it with a mad delight she has never manifested for any triumph of modern realism. The volume, we are assured, was too often torn asunder by frantic members of a household so that it might pass from hand to hand more rapidly than if it held together.
Mrs. Radcliffe not only won fame and
