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 de Blondeville.’ With them also appeared ‘St. Alban's Abbey,’ a long metrical romance, the date of which is not given, but which must have been written after Scott and Southey had begun to publish. A little volume of poems which appeared under her name in 1816, and was reissued in 1834 and 1845, is merely a collection of the verses inserted in her novels, made by an anonymous compiler, who seems to have thought that she was dead, and who took the liberty to add poems of his own. Her retirement from society also accredited a report of her insanity, which was distinctly asserted in a book entitled ‘A Tour through England,’ and was made the subject of ‘An Ode to Terror,’ published in 1810. There was not the slightest foundation for it. Mrs. Radcliffe appears to have possessed a cheerful and equable temper, and to have manifested no peculiarity except the sensitive aversion to notice which she shared with many other authoresses. For the last twelve years of her life she suffered from spasmodic asthma, and succumbed to a sudden attack on 7 Feb. 1823. She was interred at the chapel-of-ease in the Bayswater Road (the resting-place of Laurence Sterne and of Paul Sandby) belonging to St. George's, Hanover Square. Her posthumous works appeared in 1826, along with a slight but interesting memoir, apparently from the pen of her husband, whose testimony to her amiable qualities, personal attractions, and musical accomplishments bears the impress of strict truth. The memoir also contains some very discriminating criticism, which may be read with pleasure, even after the accurate but cordial estimate of her genius which Sir Walter Scott had already given in his preface to the edition of her novels published in 1824.

Mrs. Radcliffe's novels may not be much read, either now or in the future, but she will always retain in English literature the important position due to the founder of a school who was also its most eminent representative. In her peculiar art of exciting terror and impatient curiosity by the invention of incidents apparently supernatural, but eventually receiving a natural explanation, she has been surpassed by two Americans, Brockden Brown and Poe, but it is doubtful whether many English writers have rivalled her. The construction of her tales is exceedingly ingenious, and great art is evinced in the contrivances by which the action is from time to time interrupted and the reader's suspense prolonged. The spell which she exerts, however, arises no less from the manifestation of a higher artistic faculty, the creation of an environment for her personages in which their actions and adventures appear not violently improbable, and almost natural. No stories are more completely imbued with a romantic atmosphere, or are more evidently the creations of a mind instinctively turned to the picturesque side of things. To this day she has had few superiors in the art of poetical landscape, which she may almost be said to have introduced into the modern novel, and in the practice of which, as Scott remarks, she showed herself as competent to copy nature as to indulge imagination. Except, indeed, for the ingenuity of her plots, she is rather to be ranked among prose poets than among storytellers, and is especially interesting as a precursor of that general movement towards the delineation and comprehension of external nature which was to characterise the nineteenth century. Her weak side is the want of human interest, to which, however, the character of Schedoni, in ‘The Italian,’ is a marked exception. If the general conventionality of her personages disentitles her to rank among great novelists, she cannot be excluded from a place among great romancers. Her letters and journals abound with beautiful natural descriptions in the style of her novels. Her poems, mainly from imperfection of expression, are the least poetical portion of her writings. In her romances, says Leigh Hunt, she was, in the words of Mathias, ‘the mighty magician of Udolpho;’ ‘in her verses she is a tinselled nymph in a pantomime, calling up commonplaces with a wand’ (Men, Women, and Books, 1878, p. 278).



RADCLIFFE, CHARLES BLAND (1822–1889), physician, born at Brigg in the north of Lincolnshire on 2 June 1822, belonged to a family long settled in the Isle of Man, and was eldest son of Charles Radcliffe, a Wesleyan minister. [q. v.] was his younger brother. Charles completed his education, begun at home, in the grammar school at Batley, near Leeds, and was subsequently apprenticed to Mr. Hall, a general practitioner, at Wortley. He finished his medical training in Leeds, Paris, and London. In Paris he studied