"Like Mrs. Radcliffe!" That romance is indeed written in the peculiar convention which obtained with her, with Horace Walpole, with Maturin, and "Monk" Lewis; a convention of Gothic gloom and superstition, delighting in gore and apparitions, responsible for the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "The Italian," "The Monk," and other highly seasoned reading of the early years of the nineteenth century. Ainsworth deliberately modelled his manner upon Mrs. Radcliffe, changing the scenes of his desperate deeds from her favourite Italy to our own land. His pages abound in apparitions, death-watches, highwaymen, "pistols for two and breakfasts for one," daggers, poison-bowls, and burials alive, and, with a little literary ability added to his horribles, his would be a really hair-raising romance. But the blood he ladles out so plentifully is only coloured water; his spectres are only illuminated turnips on broomsticks; his verses so deplorable, his witticisms so hobnailed that even schoolboys refuse any longer to be thrilled. He "wants to make yer blood run cold," but he not infrequently raises a hearty laugh instead. It would be impossible to burlesque "Rookwood"; it burlesques itself, and shall be allowed to do so here, from the point where Alan Rookwood visits the family vault, to his tragic end:
[Illustration: THE CLOCK-TOWER AND HAUNTED AVENUE, CUCKFIELD PLACE.]
[Illustration: HARRISON AINSWORTH. _From the Fraser portrait._]
"He then walked beneath the shadow of one of the yews, chanting an odd stanza or so of one of his wild staves, wrapped the while, it would seem, in affectionate contemplation of the subject-matter of his song:
A noxious tree is the churchyard yew, As if from the dead its sap it drew; Dark are its branches, and dismal to see, Like plumes at Death's latest solemnity. Spectral and jagged, and black as the wings Which some spirit of ill o'er a sepulchre flings: Oh! a terrible tree is the churchyard yew; Like it is nothing so grimly to view.
Yet this baleful tree hath a core so sound, Can nought so tough in a grove be found: From it were fashioned brave English bows, The boast of our isle, and the dread of its foes. For our sturdy sires cut their stoutest staves From the branch that hung o'er their fathers' graves; And though it be dreary and dismal to view, Staunch at the heart is the churchyard yew.