the book. That he had a powerful imagination is not a surprise. Any one
versed in Smollett has already seen it in the remarkable situations which
he has put before us in his earlier works. These do not indicate,
however, that Smollett possessed the imagination which could excite
romantic interest; for in Roderick Random and in Peregrine Pickle, the
wonderful situations serve chiefly to amuse. In Fathom, however, there
are some designed to excite horror; and one, at least, is eminently
successful. The hero's night in the wood between Bar-le-duc and Chalons
was no doubt more blood-curdling to our eighteenth-century ancestors than
it is to us, who have become acquainted with scores of similar situations
in the small number of exciting romances which belong to literature, and
in the greater number which do not. Still, even to-day, a reader, with
his taste jaded by trashy novels, will be conscious of Smollett's power,
and of several thrills, likewise, as he reads about Fathom's experience
in the loft in which the beldame locks him to pass the night.

This situation is melodramatic rather than romantic, as the word is used
technically in application to eighteenth and nineteenth-century
literature. There is no little in Fathom, however, which is genuinely
romantic in the latter sense. Such is the imprisonment of the Countess
in the castle-tower, whence she waves her handkerchief to the young
Count, her son and would-be rescuer. And especially so is the scene in
the church, when Renaldo (the very name is romantic) visits at midnight
the supposed grave of his lady-love. While he was waiting for the sexton
to open the door, his "soul . . . was wound up to the highest pitch of
enthusiastic sorrow. The uncommon darkness, . . . the solemn silence,
and lonely situation of the place, conspired with the occasion of his
coming, and the dismal images of his fancy, to produce a real rapture of
gloomy expectation, which the whole world could not have persuaded him to
disappoint. The clock struck twelve, the owl screeched from the ruined