AN undergraduate recently went to New York for the express purpose of gathering together as many as possible of the cheapest sort of magazines for sale in the Times Square district. He worked on the theory that the Grub Street products of an age had a distinct place in its literary history. William W. Watt, in his essay on the penny, sixpenny and shilling Gothic stories that persisted long after "Frankenstein" and "The Monk" had passed out of fashion, has proved this unanswerably.

These tales of terror, thirty-six pages long if you paid sixpence, seventy if a shilling, were on everything from a "Shocking Instance of Arabian Jealousy" to "The Cross of Christ," all rife with much the same sort of atmosphere, thrills and shocks. Most of them had castles with ghostly portrait galleries, musty, deserted wings where mysterious manuscripts telling of some "awful" murder or horrible deed were discovered. The heroine is beautiful, but elusive. "Her mind is . . . like a jewel contained in a most beautiful casket." The hero is a brunette; and like the protagonists in Horatio Alger stories, he begins a peasant boy, to rise to great heights. The villain has the miraculous ability of always appearing suddenly at the crucial moment to torment his victims. And there is ever present mysterious music and the clanking of armor.

Mr. Watt has divided the "Shockers" into two groups, the castle and the convent stories. The differences between the two is merely a matter of architecture and costume. The "blue-beard baron" and the "murderous monk" for instance, both seduce virtuous maidens, and persecute heroes.

Mr. Watt has made a delightful, as well as searching, essay out of this somewhat minor subject. He recounts many of the amusing plots, and shows their amazing similarity. Various of the characters he describes with sympathy and humor, and points out recurrent mannerisms in style: the sighs, exclamations, and questions of the heroine, the Latinate names, and the "sententious association of polysyllabic ratiocination." If all honors and Ph.D. theses were made as interesting as this one, the many attacks on the scholarship and pedantry of universities would be unfounded.