Author: J. S. Le Fanu

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-02-19

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780243425891

Excerpt from Uncle Silas, Vol. 1 of 2: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh Passing by those grand romances of Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, and Kenilworth, with their terrible intricacies of crime and bloodshed, constructed with so fine a mastery of the art of exciting suspense and horror, let the reader pick out those two exceptional novels in the series which profess to paint contemporary manners and the scenes of common life; and remembering in the Antiquary the vision in the tapestried chamber, the duel, the horrible secret, and the death of old Els peth, the drowned fisherman and above all the tre mendous situation of the tide-bound party under the cliffs; and in St. Ronan's Well, the long-drawn mystery, the suspicion of insanity, and the catastrophe of suicide; -v determine whether an epithet which it would be a profanation to apply to the structure of any, even the most exciting, of Sir Walter Scott's stories is fairly applicable to tales which though i1 limitably inferior in execution yet observe the same limitations of incident, and the same moral aims.. The author trusts that the Press, to whose masterly criticism and generous encouragement he and other humble labourers in the art owe so much, will insist upon the limitation of that degrading term to the peculiar type of fiction which it was originally in tended to indicate, and prevent, as they may, its being made to include the legitimate school of tragic English romance which has been ennobled, and in great measure founded, 'by the genius of Sir Walter Scott. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.