 when
the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy
was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to
the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to
believe them himself, but he must represent his actors as believing them.
    If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else
unworthy of his perusal. Allow the possibility of the facts, and all the actors
comport themselves as persons would do in their situation. There is no bombast,
no similies, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Every thing
tends directly to the catastrophe. Never is the reader's attention relaxed. The
rules of the drama are almost observed throughout the conduct of the piece. The
characters are well drawn, and still better maintained. Terror, the author's
principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often
contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of
interesting passions.
    Some persons may perhaps think the characters of the domestics too little
serious for the general cast of the story; but besides their opposition to the
principal personages, the art of the author is very observable in his conduct of
the subalterns. They discover many passages essential to the story, which could
not well be brought to light but by their naïveté and simplicity: in particular,
the womanish terror and foibles of Bianca, in the last chapter, conduce
essentially towards advancing the catastrophe.
    It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted
work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this
piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author's defects. I could wish he had
grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this; that the sins of fathers are
visited on their children to the third and fourth generation. I doubt whether in
his time, any more than at present, ambition curbed its appetite of dominion
from the dread of so remote a punishment. And yet this moral is weakened by that
less direct insinuation, that even such anathema may be diverted by devotion to
saint Nicholas. Here the interest of the monk plainly gets the better of the
judgment of the author. However, with all its faults, I have no doubt but the
English reader will be pleased with a sight of this performance. The piety that
reigns throughout, the lessons of virtue that are inculcated, and the rigid
purity of the sentiments, exempt this work from the censure to which
