not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism,

fostered by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of

the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's The

Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and

ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in

Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and

enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century

and was represented by George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon and

Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many

authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a

master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention and

skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized

as The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin,

however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to

create a genuine weird masterpiece.

His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her

inimitable Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the

horror-classics of all time. Composed in competition with her husband,

Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy

in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the

rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion; and criticism

has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley rather than to