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212 amassed a considerable fortune,—she received five hundred pounds for "Udolpho" and eight hundred for "The Italian,"—but she gave such impetus to the novel of horrors, which had been set going by Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," that for years England was oppressed and excited by these dreadful literary nightmares. Matthew—otherwise "Monk"—Lewis, Robert Charles Maturin, and a host of feebler imitators, wrote grisly stories of ghosts, and murders, and nameless crimes, and supernatural visitations. Horrors are piled on horrors in these dismal and sulphurous tales. Blue fire envelops us, and persevering spectres, who have striven a hundred years for burial rites, sit by their victims' bedsides and recite dolorous verses, which is more than any self-respecting spectre ought to do. Compacts with Satan are as numerous as bargain counters in our city shops. Suicides alternate briskly with assassinations. In one melancholy story, the despairing heroine agrees to meet her lover in a lonely church, where they intend stabbing themselves sociably together. Unhappily, it rains hard all the afternoon, and with an unexpected touch of