Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/460

444 occurrences are more frequent than is commonly imagined, and valiantly protests against that "human pride and scepticism, and a reaction from the superstitions of a preceding age," which caused them to be concealed or denied, or explained away. In her polemics in favour of mesmerism, she scarcely does her spiriting gently.

The collection of stories published under the name of "Light and Darkness," comprises specimens of Mrs. Crowe’s manner in its "all and sundry" varieties. There is more darkness, indeed, than light; more of grave than gay; less of lively than severe. The book is beloved of those who relish a supper-full of horrors, and who find special entertainment in the simultaneous experience of the chimes of two in the morning ("not a mouse stirring," look you!), and the death-throes of a flickering lamp, and the alarms of a ghost-tale—all contributing to a shivering crisis of excitement, which sends the reader, with the perturbed gesture and dilated eyeball and stealthy tread of Queen Macbeth, "to bed—to bed—to bed!" Thus, "The Monk's Story" relates with "dreary" circumstantiality the uncomfortable mania of a somnambule for roving about o'nights, and sticking decent people in their first sleep; "The Surgeon’s Adventure" pleasantly sets forth the unpleasantries of Italian banditti, with their pastoral inns, and ragouts of the flesh stipulated for in Shylock’s bond; "The Lycanthropist," or wolf-man, who essays, with success fully equal to his merits, the part of the vampire; "The Bride's Journey," with its strange series of contretemps and narrow escapes; and "The Priest of St. Quentin," a romantic police report after the own heart of police report students. "The Poisoners" furnish similar matter, calculated to be highly welcome to "The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder," who, as their natural history and unnatural tastes are expounded in the English Opium-eater's memorable Lecture, profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short, murder-fanciers, and who, whenever the police annals of Europe bring up a fresh atrocity of that class, meet and criticise it as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art. Then, again, Mrs. Crowe's knack in getting up a case of circumstantial evidence, and