The Marquis di Zoretti was an Italian nobleman--"one of those characters in whose bosom resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["_thirst_ of _avarice_" is good!], etc.

He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of Rosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by his lordship" for a very short time only.

He plots to be free of her: she goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music.

Their son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head, Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth.

The book, if harmless, is about as worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on persons of genius, gave us _Zastrozzi_ on the one side and _Northanger Abbey_ on the other.
As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouviere, she represents the other school of abortive historical novel.