SOURCE: "Matthew Gregory Lewis," in The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, 1938. Reprint, Russell and Russell, Inc., 1964, pp. 202-308.

[In the following excerpt, Summers details the composition, contemporary critical reception, plot, style, sources, translations, adaptations, and literary influence of The Monk. Only those footnotes pertaining to the excerpt below have been reprinted.]

Towards the end of February, 1793, Lewis returned to England, and resumed his residence at Christ Church. His keeping of terms must have been irregular, at least, on account of this absence in Germany, but none the less he proceeded B.A., 1794, and M.A., 1797. During the Easter vacation he was in Scotland, where he paid a long visit to Lord Douglas at Bothwell Castle and was also the guest of the Duke of Buccleuch. He was still occupying himself with making ballads, and was further engaged upon a translation of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (1784) which, however, was not published until 1797. During the Hilary term of 1794 Lewis was at Oxford, but he did not come up for the summer since his father obtained him the position of an attaché to the British embassy at the Hague, whither Lord St. Helens¹⁶ was returning from his ambassadorship at Madrid to succeed Lord Auckland,¹⁷ who during the French revolution had been ambassador extraordinary to Holland.

Lewis arrived at the Hague on Thursday night, May 15th, 1794, where after a few days at an inn he removed to pleasant lodgings over a grocer's shop near the ambassador's hotel. Although eventually he got into a very agreeable Parisian coterie which used to assemble three times a week at the house of Madame de Matignon, Lewis found the Hague insupportably dull,—"I am certain that the devil ennui has made the Hague his favourite abode" he tells his mother—and it was only the fact that he was "horribly bit by the rage of writing," which saved him from falling into such low spirits as almost threatened to become a serious malady. His letters now are full of literary chit-chat, books he has read or is planning to write; a refusal to allow G. G. and J. Robinson, the well-known house of Paternoster Row, to publish his poem by bits and bits in magazines; the description of a little farce he has just penned on the subject of two twin brothers, one a rake-hell, and the other a broad-brim quaker, who are constantly mistaken for each other. The scenes were so arranged that the brothers never meet on the stage, and the dual rôle was, in fact, especially designed for a numerical actor, Jack Bannister,¹⁸ who produced the piece, The Twins; or, Is it He or his Brother, on the occasion of his benefit at Drury Lane, Monday, April 8th, 1799. "It was a whimsical and pleasant entertainment," says the Biographia Dramatica, but it was not adopted by the house, nor has it been printed.

At the end of April, 1794, had appeared Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Lewis commenced reading before he set out on his journey and finished immediately after his arrival at the Hague. It is, he cries, "in my opinion, one of the most interesting books ever published." It is significant, however, that he regarded the first nine chapters, as comparatively insipid, and yet these very passages with their exquisite descriptions of mountain scenery are among the finest of Mrs. Radcliffe's work. His imagination, however, was set afire by the lone Castle amid the far Appenines, those awful halls of dread where the dark Montoni was lord of life and death. Once more inspired to continue his own romance "in the style of The Castle of Otranto" he set to work to extricate the dying man from his difficulties, but finding himself unable to carry the story further, he was soon obliged yet again to lay it on one side.¹⁹

Not to be baffled, he wisely determined to begin altogether anew, on an entirely fresh track and this time things went smoothly, for on September 23rd. he triumphantly asks his mother: "What do you think of my having written, in the space of ten weeks, a romance of between three and four hundred pages octavo? I have even written out half of it fair. It is called The Monk, and I am myself so much pleased with it that, if the booksellers will not buy it, I shall publish it myself." Two months after, his last letter from the Hague, November 22nd, tells Mrs. Lewis that he will not send her the manuscript of The Monk since he prefers to hand it to her himself when they meet in London. "For my own part, I have not written a line excepting the Farce, and The Monk, which is a work of some length, and will make an octavo volume of 420 pages. There is a great deal of poetry inserted," and so as a bonne bouche he encloses a copy of the "Inscription in an Hermitage" which occurs in Chapter II. (In the printed text of The Monk there are some few trifling variants.) As Lewis signed his octosyllabic Preface, Imitation of Horace,²⁰ Epistles, Book I, Ep. 20, "Hague, Oct. 28th, 1794," we may assume that he then completed his fair copy, and his pages were ready for the press.

Lewis' father now recalled him to England, and in December Matthew Gregory was back in London. He spent the Christmas of 1794 at Devonshire-place.

Very soon he set about finding a publisher for his romance, nor did he experience much difficulty in the quest. In March, 1796,²¹The Monk was first published, in three volumes, duodecimo, by John Bell, 148 Oxford Street, at nine shillings. It was re-issued in April²² at half a guinea, whilst in October of the same year appeared a second edition, so designated on the title-page. The third, fourth, and fifth editions, all severally distinguished on their titles, followed in 1797, 1798, and 1800. In the fourth and fifth editions the title was changed to Ambrosio, or The Monk. Bell's advertisement, however, on the last leaf of The Castle Spectre, published, octavo, early in 1798, runs: "In a few Days will be published, By Joseph Bell, No. 148, Oxford Street, The Fourth Edition, With considerable Additions and Alterations, Of The Monk, A Romance, In Three Volumes. By M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P. Author Of The Castle Spectre, Etc. Price 10s. 6d."

In March, 1797, Bell found it necessary to inform the public that a few copies of the Second Edition still remained. "The Book has been reported out of print, and as a Grand Ballet has been brought forward, taken from the above work, many people may wish to see the book before the performance; and as it will be some months before a new edition can be ready to supply the demand, he has given this notice."

The Grand Ballet to which he makes reference was Raymond and Agnes; or, The Castle of Lindenburgh, "a New Grand Ballet Pantomime of Action," produced at Covent Garden on Thursday, March 16th, 1797, which proved a great success and drew the whole town, so that Mathias exclaimed in horror: "And one of our publick theatres has allured the publick attention still more to this novel, by a scenick representation of an Episode in it. O Proceres Censore opus est, an Haruspice nobis!"²³ The Episode of the Bleeding Nun indeed immediately captured the imagination of all perfervid romantics, and as early as 1799 it was extracted and separately printed in chap-book form as The Castle of Lindenburg; or the History of Raymond and Agnes.²⁴

The differences between the first issue of The Monk, March, 1796, and the second issue, April, are very evident. Several errors of the first issue will be found to be duly corrected in the second, and there are distinctive bibliographical variations into which it is hardly necessary to enter here.²⁵ One extremely important point remains. Volume III of the first issue concludes the text with the death of Ambrosio immediately after he is dashed upon the sharp rocks by the demon and rolls from precipice to precipice. A short horizontal line is drawn, and there follows a passage of somewhat obvious morality which begins: "Haughty Lady, why shrunk you back when yon poor frail-one drew near?" In the second issue, after Ambrosio has fallen from a terrific height into the abyss, there follows a description of his agonies during six days, until his mangled corpse is swept away by the rising flood of waters. The paragraph of the Haughty Lady does not appear.

In the Second Edition of The Monk we find the shorter ending of the first issue together with the Haughty Lady paragraph. This is repeated in the third edition (1797), in the fourth edition, "with considerable additions and alterations" (1798), and in the fifth edition, "with considerable additions and alterations" (1800.)

The longer conclusion with Ambrosio's sufferings appears in the Dublin edition, 2 volumes, 1796; and also in the T. and H. Purkess illustrated edition of 1859.

It is difficult to surmise why Lewis should have preferred the rather abrupt ending and the little tag of trite morality to the more violent yet far more effective description. It has been suggested that possibly he thought the latter, however awesome, might be recognized as too obviously resembling the catastrophe of Die Teufelsbeschwörung in the Sagen der Vorzeit of Veit Weber (G. P. Leonhard Wächter).²⁶

Mr. Louis F. Peck was, I believe, the first to point out that the well-known Waterford edition, 3 vols., 12mo, dated 1796, has 1818 watermarks, and since Lewis died in 1818 it seems tolerably certain that in consequence of his decease some enterprising printer, presaging that the obituary notices would awaken fresh interest in The Monk, resourcefully landed a number of "first editions" on the market.²⁷

In a note, written in 1798, as an addendum to an existing note in his Pursuits of Literature (The Fourteenth Edition, 1808, p. 247), Matthias, quoting from The Monk, pp. 247-8, the passages regarded as profane, which describe how Ambrosio examines Antonia's Bible and his reflections thereon, says: "I refer to the third edition of The Monk;²⁸ for it must never be forgotten, that three editions of this novel have been circulated through the kingdom, without any alteration whatsoever, which fear or, as I hope, a better principle has induced Mr. Lewis to make, since this denunciation was first published (1798)." Ambrosio; or the Monk, "By M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P. Fifth Edition, in 3 Vol. Price 12s. in boards," is advertised by Bell in the Second Edition, 1801, of Tales of Wonder. Bell also advertised this Fifth Edition of The Monk at the end of Adelmorn the Outlaw, 8vo, 1801, but adds: "N.B. The First Edition of the above Romance may be had at the Publisher's, price One Guinea."

To exaggerate the success and scandal of The Monk were impossible. Lewis at once became famous, and a celebrity he remained. "The first names in rank and talent sought his society; he was the lion of every fashionable party." This he found extremely agreeable, for Sir Walter Scott tells us: "Lewis was fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or a man of fortune. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth, and was particularly fond of any one who had a title. You could have sworn he had been a parvenu of yesterday, yet he had been all his life in good society."²⁹ After all, when fame comes at twenty, a little touch of snobbishness is a pardonable fault;³⁰ nor was Matthew Gregory the real snob, for, even if he loved gilded salons and coronets, he did a thousand kind turns to those who were insignificant and poor; nor did he ever treat his inferiors in purse, talent or station with the slightest discourtesy or ill-breeding. A more generous, a more civil gentleman never existed.

In these days of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, and—for aught I know—even duller bawdry, that The Monk should have given offence may well seem incomprehensible. Yet such indeed proved the case. Never was such a clamour, such an outcry, heard since Troy Town fell, or the geese hissed upon the Capitol, for at the noise one might have believed that the very pillars of religion and decency were shaken to the dust and crumbled away, that the reign of Cotytto had returned, that the altars of Priapus were set up in St. Paul's. Even a hundred years after it had first appeared, at the end of the nineteenth century, I can well remember that The Monk was spoken of as a lewd book and still regarded with sternest disapproval. Thus in The Imperial Dictionary of National Biography (1890) Francis Espinasse, with a gesture of repugnance, condemned this famous fiction as "shamelessly voluptuous." The Monk definitely took its place with pornography, among the volumes labelled "Curious," Facetiae," "Erotica." It was classed with Hic et Hœc, The Romance of Lust, Miss Coote and The Recollections of a Mary-Ann. Amazing as it may appear even to-day, the crusted old tradition is sturdily maintained.³¹

There is, indeed, something a little extraordinary—one is tempted to write something morbid—in the persistence with which so uncritical and so unsound a prejudice survives; but, instructive as the diagnosis might prove, it hardly concerns us now, for our business is with the contemporary reception of The Monk. The attack was not immediate, but when the storm burst it bellowed none the less tempestuous and loud. The earliest reviews were favourable. "The author of this romance has amplified the character of the Santon³² Barsissa in the Guardian, in a most masterly and impressive manner. We really do not remember to have read a more interesting production. The stronger passions are finely delineated and exemplified in the progress of artful temptation working on self-sufficient pride, superstition, and lasciviousness. The author has availed himself of a German tradition which furnishes an episodical incident, awful, but improbable. The whole is very skilfully managed, and reflects the highest credit on the judgement and imagination of the writer. Some beautiful little ballads are interspersed, which indicate no common poetical talents." With more flippancy than politeness the Analytical Review³³ remarked of Matilda: "The whole temptation is so artfully contrived, that a man, it would seem, were he made as other men are, would deserve to be d d who could resist such devilish spells, conducted with such address, and assuming such a heavenly form."

Lewis, however, was only too soon to discover how "the odious task of writing" entails upon its professors "envy, slander, and malignity," and that an author is merely "an object of newspaper animadversion and impertinence," a bitter fatality which seems as inevitable to-day as ever it was a century and a half ago. The Critical Review³⁴ suspected the writer of the new romance "of a species of brutality," whilst the abominations contained in these pages were clearly "such as no observation of character can justify, because no good man would willingly suffer them to pass, how transiently, through his own mind." It warned all fathers that The Monk "is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale." In fine the whole work could be summed up as "a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee." The Monthly Review³⁵ severely reprehended "the vein of obscenity which corrupted the entire narrative." The Scots Magazine³⁶ was indignant at the evil influence of such romances, scattered far and wide by indefatigable circulating libraries. This cant, which could be repeated to weariness, might not perhaps cause any great surprise coming from paltry reviewers, but it is painful to find that Moore affected to think The Monk "libidinous and impious," whilst Byron set down in his Journal, Monday, December 6th, 1813, such remarks as the following: "I looked yesterday at the worst parts of the Monk. These descriptions ought to have been written by Tiberius at Caprea—they are forced—the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary. It is to me inconceivable how they could have been composed by a man of only twenty—his age when he wrote them. They have no nature—all the sour cream of cantharides. I should have suspected Buffon of writing them on the death-bed of his detestable dotage. I had never redde this edition, and merely looked at them from curiosity and recollection of the noise they made, and the name they had left to Lewis. But they could do no harm."³⁷

It is at least amusing to think of Tiberius, crowned with laurel lest the lightning should strike him, in a garden at Capri, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him, and the flute-player mocked the bearer of the censer, reading not the shameful books of Elephantis,³⁸ but writing upon his tabulœ with ivory style the first draft of the Gothic chapters of The Monk.

Keenly as Lewis felt the acrimonious and unwarranted attacks upon his romance, he was the more deeply hurt on account of the vexation thereby caused to his father, who expressed himself as in no small degree displeased and distressed. The very manly, affectionate and straightforward letter which the young author addressed to Mr. Lewis on February 23rd, 1798, has several times been printed,³⁹ and it must have proved more than sufficient to set his father's mind at rest. That it did so seems certain from the fact that the excellent relations existing between them were not disturbed; and if Mr. Lewis regretted what he might consider his son's imprudence, he must at any rate have taken a just pride in his literary reputation and renown. Matthew Gregory in the course of his letter assures his father of the rectitude of his intentions; his experience now shows him to have been in the wrong when he published the first edition of The Monk, but it was the lack of knowledge of a youth of twenty which gave offence; he has made the only reparation in his power by carefully revising the work and expurging every syllable on which could be grounded the slightest construction of immorality, a charge not brought against the sentiments, characters, or general tendency of the work, but merely against some careless expressions and descriptions considered a little too warm, "a few ill-judged and unguarded passages."

The charge of irreligion was, perhaps, more serious. Yet to support this only one passage, which he is heartily sorry was ever published, had been or could be produced. In this respect he has been most unfairly treated. It is true that the expressions he used were much too strong, and he now sees that their style is irreverent. None the less the passage was only intended to convey that certain parts of the Bible should not be read before such an age as the student is capable of benefiting by its precepts and admiring its beauties. It also suggested the propriety of not putting certain passages before the eyes of very young persons. He never for a moment intended, and he believed he had sufficiently guarded against, any idea of attacking the Sacred Volume. None the less he has given offence, and he can only assure his hostile critics on this score that they have totally mistaken both himself and his principles. He is sorry for having given offence, and requests the pardon of his father for the uneasiness which this business has caused a parent whom he so regards with such true affection.

Before we examine more particularly the passage in question, which was condemned as impious and profane, it will not be impertinent to glance briefly at the censure of Lewis by Thomas James Mathias, since it was this very alleged irreverence which so grossly scandalized the satirist and stirred his hottest wrath.

Mathias, who was major-fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1776, proceeded M.A. the following year. He received the appointments of sub-treasurer and then treasurer to Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III; was created F.S.A. and F.R.S. in 1795; and in 1812 became librarian of Buckingham Palace. In 1817 he visited Italy, and translated freely from the Italian into English, obtaining a wide reputation as an Italian scholar. He died in 1835.

The Pursuits of Literature, a satirical poem, was published in Four Dialogues; the First in May, 1794; the Second and Third in June, 1796; and the Fourth in July, 1797. It was equipped with an immense lumbering apparatus of Introduction and Notes, whilst as it went on its way through sixteen editions⁴⁰ numerous alterations, corrections and additions were made, not only in the text but in the commentary. In the Fourth Dialogue, after returning to a most unreasonable and abusive onslaught on the celebrated Richard Payne Knight, and his "foul Priapus," as Mathias courteously terms this great scholar's An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus lately existing in Isernia,⁴¹ the poem continues:

But though that Garden-God forsaken dies;
Another Cleland see in Lewis rise.
Why sleep the ministers of truth and law?
Has the State no control, no decent awe,
While each with each in madd'ning orgies vie,
Panders to lust, and licens'd blasphemy?
Can Senates hear without a kindred rage?
Oh, may a Poet's light'ning blast the page,
Nor with the bolt of Nemesis in vain
Supply the laws, that wake not to restrain.

John Cleland, the son of Colonel Cleland, the Will Honeycomb of The Spectator, was born late in 1709,⁴² and admitted to Westminster School in 1722. Whilst quite young he obtained the appointment of British Consul at Smyrna, and in 1736, having entered the service of the East India Company, he resided for a time at Bombay. Upon his return to London he wrote several novels and plays, the most famous of his works being that to which Mathias here refers, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Owing to the voluptuousness of the descriptions Cleland was called before the Privy Council and officially reprimanded, but when he pleaded his poverty, on condition that he would not write another romance of this nature he was granted an annual pension of £100. He died in Petty France, on January 23rd, 1789, aged eighty.⁴³

The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which is perhaps better known under the title Fanny Hill, is certainly a masterpiece of English erotic literature, but to suggest that there is any comparison or point of contact between Cleland's work and The Monk is egregious nonsense. It would hardly be possible to name any two works of fiction which less resemble one another in every particular.

In a bombast note Mathias thus belabours The Monk: "The publication of this novel by a Member of Parliament is in itself so serious an offence to the public that I know not how the author can repair this breach of public decency, but by suppressing it himself: or he might omit the indecent and blasphemous passages in another edition." (This note was written in July, 1797, and in the previous year Lewis had taken his seat in Parliament for Hindon, Wilts.) "Novels of this seductive and libidinous tendency," continues Mathias, "excite disgust, fear, and horror."⁴⁴

The Preface to this Fourth Dialogue is even more vituperative and denunciatory. "There is one publication of the time too peculiar and too important to be passed over in a general reprehension. There is nothing with which it may be compared. A legislator in our own parliament, a member of the House of Commons of Great Britain, an elected guardian and defender of the laws, the religion, and the good manners of the country, has neither scrupled nor blushed to depict, and to publish to the world, the arts of lewd and systematic seduction, and to thrust upon the nation the most open and unqualified blasphemy against the very code and volume of our religion. And all this, with his name, style, and title, prefixed to the novel or romance called 'THE MONK.'" There is appended a huffing ruffling note: "At first I thought that the name and title [M.P.] of the author were fictitious, and some of the public papers hinted it. But I have been solemnly and repeatedly assured by the Bookseller himself, that it is the writing and publication of M. LEWIS, Esq. Member of Parliament. It is sufficient for me to point out Chap. 7 of Vol. 2. As a composition, the work would have been better, if the offensive and scandalous passages had been omitted, and it is disgraced by a diablerie and nonsense fitted only to frighten children in the nursery. I believe this SEVENTH CHAPTER of Vol. 2 is indictable at Common Law." Mathias cites the prosecutions of Edmund Curii and Cleland, continuing with all the meretricious adjuvants of capitals and italics to express his horror and detestation: "To the passages of obscenity (which certainly I shall not copy in this place) Mr Lewis has added BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE SCRIPTURES."⁴⁵ He then quotes in full from The Monk the famous episode where Ambrosio finds Antonia reading the Bible. "'How,' said the Prior to himself, 'Antonia reads the Bible, and is still so ignorant?'" The Prior discovers, however, that Antonia's mother has provided a copy of the Scriptures "copied out with her own hand," from which are omitted those passages she considered unsuitable for young persons to study.

Surely this principle, denounced by Mathias as "unqualified blasphemy," is none other than that which suggested such publications as Line upon Line, Bible Stories for the Young, and a hundred similar redactions. Some seven years ago, for example, the Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, in conjunction with two other Fellows of the University, edited not only a "Children's Bible," but even "A Little Children's Bible," both of which are most grievously mutilated, whilst the text, "That of the Authorized Version," even ventures on "occasional corrections." Moreover, the University Press did not blush to announce: "It is hoped to publish later, in the same style, a School Bible, suitable for older boys and girls. This will be, in effect, the Authorized Version with considerable omissions."

Lewis never intended anything more than this.⁴⁶ We may perhaps allow (as he himself acknowledges) that he expresses himself a little roughly and awkwardly in this passage, but that he should therefore be assailed as a blasphemer, a scoffer and unhallowed sacrilegist, threatened and coarsely denounced, can only be ascribed to an excess of that fanatical exhibitionism which shatter-brained cranks so love to stimulate and indulge. This indeed is the root of the whole matter, for we can hardly read a score of lines (with their cumbrous baggage of notes) from The Pursuits of Literature without recognizing that we have to deal with a mind almost dangerously unbalanced. The rancour and enmity this "Satirical Poem" displays are certainly morbid, and had Max Nordau only known of these ebullitions with what glee would this fané journalist have instanced, in support of his pesudo-literary mock-psychiatrical theories, Thomas James Mathias as a first-class fìn-de-siècle degenerate, with what gusto would he have dwelt upon the hysteria, the paroxysms of piety, the graphomania, egomania, paraphasia vesana, and the whole fardel of nonsense tricks.

Lewis was very naturally chagrined at such an outrageous assault; albeit he treated "the fury of the 'Pursuits of Literature,' &c," with deserved contempt.

Nor did Lewis lack defenders, for in 1798 was published anonymously "Impartial Structures on the Poem called 'The Pursuits of Literature,' and particularly a Vindication of the romance of The Monk." Lewis' youngest sister, Sophia, wrote a brief defence of The Monk, but without her name and unacknowledged. Lewis, however, was not obliged by these champions, for, to use his own phrase, he strongly disliked "flaming eulogium," and he also entertained some degree of prejudice against female authorship.

It was acutely observed at the time that, if the composition of The Monk was in any way a reproach to the author, then the unbounded popularity of this romance was a far stronger reflection upon public taste.

An amusing anecdote is told: "When 'Monk' Lewis's sensational romance was in universal request, a Mrs. Lord, who kept a circulating library in Dublin, enriched it with sufficient copies for her customers old and young. .. . A highly correct paterfamilias having reproved her for imperilling the morality of the metropolis by admitting such a book in her catalogue, she naively replied: 'A shocking bad book to be sure, sir; but I have carefully looked through every copy, and underscored all the naughty passages, and cautioned my young ladies what they are to skip without reading it.'"

Actually about eighteen months after the appearance of The Monk the Attorney-General was instructed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice to move for an injunction to prevent the sale of the book. A rule nisi was even obtained, but it was never made absolute, and certain passages being modified, the prosecution dropped.

Famous and frequently reprinted as The Monk is, it may not be entirely superfluous to remind ourselves very briefly of the principal incidents in the story. Ambrosio, the Monk, is Abbot of the Capuchins at Madrid, and revered throughout the city for his sanctity. A son of mystery, his parentage is unknown, since whilst an infant he was found by the brethren laid at their abbey door, a gift, they like to think, from heaven. The youngest novice of the house, Rosario, becomes a particular favourite with the abbot, who one evening when they are together in the gardens to his horror and amaze discovers that his companion is a woman. The lady declares herself to be Matilda de Villanegas, the daughter of a noble house, passionately avowing that she has for his dear love alone penetrated the cloistral walls. As her cowl falls back he recognizes in her radiant beauty a sacred picture which some two years before had been bought by the monks, and which has been the object of his increasing adoration.⁴⁷ Matilda confesses that she thus conveyed her portrait to his notice. After a brief, but fierce struggle, the celibate yields to the overwhelming temptation and seeks satisfaction in her wanton embraces. Howbeit anon comes satiety, and then disgust. Ambrosio is requested to attend a widow, a stranger to Madrid, who is sick, Donna Elvira Dalfa. At the house of his new penitent he sees and becomes violently enamoured of her daughter, Antonia, a lovely maiden of fifteen. Matilda consents to aid his designs and help debauch the innocent object of his hot desires. In order to complete these ends she summons a fallen angel, and at midnight in the dark vaults of the monastery the monk takes part in impious rites. By means of a magic spell he gains admittance to Antonia's chamber and is about to violate her, when Elvira interrupts the ravisher. In order to escape he murders the hapless woman, and, unsuspected, regains his cloister. By Matilda's contrivance he then administers a soporific draught to the orphan Antonia, and being taken for dead she is conveyed to the vaults for sepulchre. Here Ambrosio waits her hour of wakening, and in spite of her cries effects his lustful purpose. To conceal his crime in a wild frenzy he stabs her, but the fact is almost immediately discovered. With Matilda he is thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition, and accused of horrid crimes, murder, rape, and sorcery. Torture is applied, a full confession being extorted from the fears of his accomplice, when both are condemned to the stake. Matilda obtains freedom by devoting herself to the demon, and at the last moment Ambrosio also vows himself to the fiend on the condition of instant release. He is borne to the wilds of the Sierra Morena where the mocking spirit informs him that Elvira, whom he slew, was his mother, Antonia whom he raped and killed was his sister. The condition of release has been fulfilled, no more will be granted. The wretched monk is then hurled into the abyss.

With these main incidents is threaded the love story of Don Raymond de las Cisternas and Agnes de Medina Celi. Raymond on his travels meets Agnes in Germany at the Castle of Lindenberg, which is haunted by the Bleeding Nun. Owing to a variety of circumstances they are separated, and Agnes, at Madrid, is forced to join the sisterhood of S. Clare. Ambrosio, who discovers the secret of her love, denounces her to the domina, Mother S. Agatha, a very severe old superior, who, enraged at the scandal, gives out she is dead and condemns her to perpetual imprisonment in the vaults. A kindly nun, Mother S. Ursula, manages to convey the truth to Raymond, and Agnes is released, Ambrosio and Matilda being found in the subterranean corridors by the rescuing party.

There is one very weak point in the story which Lewis could easily have cleared up, but he apparently forgot or was not at the pains to disentangle. This results in a contradiction. Matilda is represented throughout as a woman who has fallen in love with the Monk, who has skilfully contrived that her portrait under the guise of a sacred subject shall be brought to his notice, who has recourse to magic in order to effect her ends, and who only escapes from the prisons of the Holy Office by an impious contract. At the end the fiend tells Ambrosio that his blind idolatry of the picture was made largely instrumental in his seduction and fall. "I bade a subordinate, but crafty spirit assume a similar form, and you eagerly yielded to the blandishments of Matilda." This runs counter to the whole tenour of the narrative. We cannot accept the temptress as a female Mephistopheles. If Matilda was a succubus, many of the preceding incidents are impossible and out of gear. The whole discrepancy, which is serious, could have been obviated by the omission of the one sentence quoted above, and the story would have gained. I like to think that this vaunt of the demon is a mere oversight, and, in reading, I delete it—at least mentally—from the text.⁴⁸

There are indeed many other manifest errors. To the profound—and in the case of Lewis distorted and almost farcical—ignorance of the religious orders, of convents and the enclosed life, which marks nearly all the Gothic romances detailed attention has already been drawn, so this point need hardly be dwelt upon here. It is not impertinent perhaps to repeat that the Monk himself is not a monk, but a Franciscan friar; and not an Abbot, but the Guardian of a Capuchin house. Incidentally the Capuchins during the course of the narrative are often described as "monks," whilst Ambrosio is called "the friar." The community of Poor Clares, than whom no nuns observe a stricter enclosure, leave their convent to visit the church, and even join in a grand procession through the midnight streets of the capital. The abbess is invariably termed the prioress, a trifling blunder in view of such grosser absurdities.

It has been shrewdly observed that in the work of Lewis "Convent life is represented from the point of view not of an ultra-Protestant but of a Voltairean freethinker," and the reviewer who announced that Matthew Gregory Lewis "is the spiritual parent of Maria Monk and all that grisly brood" was certainly very wide of the mark.

Nor is The Monk without some lighter strokes. Leonella is an amusing character with her exposition on the differences between the two sexes—happily interrupted by the arrival of the preacher—her amorous casting of nets for Don Christoval, the billet-doux she writes in red ink to express the blushes of her cheek, the pastoral dress she dons to receive her supposed admirer, when she is discovered simpering over the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor, nor is she a whit too farcical. The loquacious Jacintha is well drawn, an admirable sketch of a landlady, and indubitably from the life. There is humour too in the gossip of the religious at the grate when Theodore sings a ballad of Denmark: "Denmark, say you?" mumbled an old nun. "Are not the people all blacks in Denmark?"

"By no means, reverend lady; they are of a delicate pea-green, with flame-coloured hair and whiskers."

"Mother of God! Pea-green?" exclaimed sister Helena: "Oh! 'tis impossible!"

"Impossible," said the porteress, with a look of contempt and exultation: "Not at all: when I was a young woman, I remember seeing several of them myself."

Nor does Lewis for his Spanish scene rely merely upon references to "the Prado," Murcia, Cordova, to Amadis de Gaul, Tirante the White, Don Galaor,⁴⁹ to Lope de Vega and Calderon, to pilgrimages to S. James of Compostella, nor does he seek to obtain 'local atmosphere' with ejaculations such as "By St. Jago!" His art reaches much higher than such empty histrionics, and it has been well said: "Lewis is content with a few dusky strokes, but they evoke the torridities of Southern life. Nothing could be better in this vein than the opening of The Monk describing the excited crowd gathered in the Capuchin Church at Madrid to hear the great preacher Abbot Ambrosio. You can almost hear the fans whir and smell the stale incense."

It is indeed a remarkable tribute to the power of The Monk that in spite of all the imperfections, and indeed improprieties, in regard to the cloister, faults and ignorances which might well have proved fatal to the romance, the genius of Lewis shows itself so extraordinary that it makes nothing of them, and when we are reading his pages, so great is their fascination, the blemishes simply cease to be. The interest of the narrative enthralls and hurries one from incident to incident. His convents, his monks and nuns I regard as harmless, a mere fairyland of melodramatic adventure, delightfully mysterious and transpontine, having no relation at all to reality. I will not spare to quote a severe enough critic, although I cannot endorse his disapproval, but I echo the final praise: "Besides copious use of magic, incantations, and spirits to carry on his story, and his wanton gloating over scenes of luxury and license (hideously complicated by matricide and unconscious incest), Lewis resorted to an even more revolting category of horrors—loathsome images of mortal corruption and decay, the festering relics of death and the grave. But even when its startling defects and blemishes are fully admitted, The Monk remains in every way a marvellous production for a boy of twenty."

Mrs. Radcliffe is the romanticist of the Gothic novel; Lewis the realist. His pictures of voluptuous passion are necessary to the narrative; the violence of the orgasm but serves to balance and throw in high relief the charnel horrors. The comeliest forms of man and maid entwined in quivering embrace that Aretine might have imaged in his shameless sonnets, the long rapture of warm honeyed kisses such as Secundus sung, the full swift pulse of life, beauty, love, desire, all these are suddenly shadowed by the dark pall of mortality; those eyes that sparkled with lust's flame must fade and close in night, those hands whose touch was as a draught of heady wine must palsy, grow cold, and decay, the worm must pasture on those corrupting limbs where lovers' teeth once bit the white flesh in frenzy of sadistic appetite.

In his "Advertisement" Lewis thus acknowledges his sources: "The first idea of this Romance was suggested by the story of the Santon Barsisa, related in The Guardian. The Bleeding Nun is a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany; and I have been told that the ruins of the earth of Lauenstein, which she is supposed to haunt, may yet be seen upon the borders of Thuringia. The Water King, from the third to the twelfth stanza, is the fragment of an original Danish ballad; and Belerma and Duranderte is translated from some stanzas to be found in a collection of old Spanish poetry, which contains also the popular song of Gayferos and Melesindra, mentioned in Don Quixote. I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself; but I doubt not many more may be found of which I am at present totally unconscious."

The story of the hermit Barsisa is to be found in No. 148 of The Guardian, August 31st, 1713. Satan, enraged by the surpassing holiness of Barsisa, contrives that the daughter of a king shall be sent to him to heal of her sickness. The beauty of the princess tempts the santon to violate her. Afterwards, at the fiend's suggestion, he kills his victim, burying her in his grotto, where the body is found. Barsisa is seized, and upon the gallows he adores the Evil One who promises in return to save him from death, but who immediately mocks and abandons his wretched prey. "Le Santon," says the French original, "dementit en un moment une vertu de cent années."

Lewis undoubtedly found the Legend of the Bleeding Nun⁵⁰ in a tale by Johann Karl August Musaeus,⁵¹Die Entführing, published in the Volksmärchen der Deutschen, Gotha, 1787, Part V, pp. 247-276. Musaeus, who was a professor in the gymnasium at Weimar, was personally known to and had often discussed German literature with Lewis when "the Monk" was residing in that town. Rudolf Fürst, Vorläufer der modernen Novelle, Halle, 1897, pp. 88-99, draws attention to a story by Naubert in her Die neuen Volksmärchen der Deutschen, 1789-92, entitled Die wiesse Frau, which tells of Neuhaus Castle in Bohemia, haunted by the ghost of Count Rosenberg's mistress. Fürst, p. 188, also mentions a legend not unlike The Bleeding Nun in Gajetan Tschink's Wundergeschichten sammt dem Schlüssel zu ihrer Erklarung, 1792. August Sauer, the editor of Grillparzer (Vol. I, 1909) is inclined to suppose that many of these ghost stories were suggested by Der Höllische Proteus oder tausendkünstige Versteller, vermittelst Erzahlung der vielsaltigen Bilderwechselungen erscheinender Gespenster, of Erasmus Franciscus, first published at Nüremburg, 8vo, 1695.⁵²

The Water King, the ballad sung by the disguised page, Theodore, to the nuns, is a free adaptation of Der Wassermann from J. T. von Herder's Stimmen der Völker in Liedern, for which collection it was taken from Et Hundsede udvalde Danske viser, förögede med det andet Hundrede of Peder Syv, Copenhagen, 1695, which derives from Andel Sörensen Vedel's 700 udvalgte Danske viser. It was reprinted in Tales of Wonder.

Belerma and Durandarte is chanted by Matilda to the convalescent Ambrosio. It will be readily remembered how Don Quixote witnesses (and interrupts) the motion of Don Gayferos and the fair Melisandra. The story, says Lockhart, is told at great length in the Spanish Cancioneros.

The Monthly Review"⁵³ in June, 1797, angrily endeavoured to strip The Monk of any originality. "The form of temptation," the critic declared, "is borrowed from that of The Devil in Love by Cazotte; and the catastrophe is taken from The Sorcerer . . . the forest scene near Strasburg brings to mind an incident in Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom . . . and the convent prison resembles the inflictions of Mrs. Radcliffe."⁵⁴

Jacques Cazotte was born at Dijon in 1720. Most of his life was spent as a Civil Servant, and during the Reign of Terror he was arrested and executed in September, 1792. Le Diable Amoureux, his most famous work, appeared in 1772. An English translation was anonymously published in 1793, whilst in 1810 an inferior version, Biondetta or the Enamoured Spirit was "dedicated without permission to M. G. Lewis, Esq." In the ruins of Portici Don Alvaro Maravillas invokes a spirit, who appears first in the form of a camel, and then as a spaniel. The dog is changed into a page, Biondetto, who is in reality a female, that is to say a succubus, Biondetta. She exhibits the most passionate love for Alvaro, but after many adventures by a violent effort he renounces her and she vanishes as a black cloud. We learn that all that has happened was a phantasmagoria, and that the evil spirit had led Alvaro to the edge of the precipice when he was saved. Myself I can see no sort of connexion between Cazotte's story and The Monk. The horrid wiles of the succubus may be read of in almost any demonologist.

The catastrophe of The Monk and the doom of Ambrosio (particularly, as noted before, in the amplified form) are, it is true, closely modelled upon Der Teufelsbeschwörung, a romance by George Philipp Ludgwig Leonhard Wächter,⁵⁵ who wrote under the name of Veit Weber. This work was translated into English by Robert Huish as The Sorcerer, "A tale from the German of Veit Weber," and published at 4s. in one volume by Johnson, 1795.

The adventures with the robbers in Baptiste's cottage may derive a hint, but nothing more than the barest hint from Chapters XX and XXI of Ferdinand Count Fathom,⁵⁶ when Ferdinand being "overtaken by a terrible tempest, falls upon Scylla, seeking to avoid Charybdis." The episode is conceived and related in full Gothic vein by Smollett, but Lewis not so much improves a mere outline, but gives the whole situation an entirely different and original turn. Lewis himself was copied both in fiction and upon the stage times without number.⁵⁷

When Lewis was writing the extravagantly transpontine melodrama of his Convent scenes, he clearly had not forgotten Monvel's lurid Les Victimes cloîtrées and Marsollier's Camille, ou le Souterrain, both of which pieces he mentions in a letter to his mother⁵⁸ as having seen in Paris during his stay there in the summer of 1791, when they awakened his liveliest interest. Although he does not speak of other similar plays, it is obvious that he had also seen or read several more "anticlerical" dramas, such, for example, as Baculard d'Arnaud's Euphémie, the Convent of Olympe de Gouges, and the notorious Julie, ou la Religieuse de Nisme by Pougens, in which latter the description of Julie in the dungeon very nearly resembles the picture of the imprisoned Agnes in The Monk.

The first literary record of a doomed wanderer, the "Wandering Jew," occurs in the Flores Historiarum of Roger of Wendover, a monk of S. Albans, who died in 1237. Hence with some slight amplification it was incorporated in the Historia Major of Matthew Paris who died in 1259. The account is given on the authority of a certain Armenian Bishop who visited England in 1228 and who related how he had himself met the Wanderer. A similar version, also on the authority of the Armenian Bishop, is recorded by the Flemish chronicler, Philippe Mousket, Bishop of Tournai, about 1243.

The story was well known in Italy at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and originally came from Jerusalem, where a legend of a witness of the Crucifixion, doomed to an accursed immortality, was current in very early times. The Wanderer is given many names, and there are many variants of the tale identifying him with several characters. The popularity of the story during the last three centuries is in the first place mainly due to a German chap-book, Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Judem mit Namen Ahasverus, 1602. The narrative is told by a Lutheran pastor, Paulus von Eitzen, who died in 1598, and who stated that at Hamburg in the year 1542 he had met the Jew Ahasuerus from whose lips he had the story. Whence or why the name Ahasuerus is not clear. In old English tradition the Wanderer is called Cartaphilus, a door-keeper of Pilate's house, who seeing the Saviour go forth carrying His Cross, struck Him crying: "Go faster, why dost Thou linger?" Whereupon the Lord made reply: "I go indeed, but thou shalt tarry until I come again." Not a few persons have met this figure of mystery, the Wandering Jew, and have left their witness. I see no reason to doubt the facts, although naturally legend has grown up about them and literature has used them in many guises.⁵⁹

A French version, Historie admirable d'un Juif Errant, dating from the seventeenth century, adds striking particulars. The theme of the Wandering Jew attracted Goethe, and Christian Schubart's poem Der Ewige Jude, 1787, was read with admiration by Lewis. About 1810 it was Shelley, or Thomas Medwin, who "picked up, dirty and torn, in Lincoln's Inn Fields," a fragment of an English version of Schubart's poem in The German Museum, Vol. HI, 1803. Shelley at once conceived and Medwin joined with him in a long metrical romance, something in the style of Scott, on the subject of the Wandering Jew. When seven or eight cantos were written, Shelley essayed various publishers, but four cantos of the poem first appeared in The Edinburgh Literary Journal for 1829 with Shelley's preface, dated January, 1811. The four cantos (in a different version and with the sanction of Mrs. Shelley) were also printed as "an unpublished poem" in Fraser's Magazine three years after they had been given in The Edinburgh Literary Journal. Medwin, whose account of the collaboration is unsatisfactory and inconsistent, claimed to have written almost entirely by himself the first three, if not indeed the first four, cantos, and the vision in the third canto he acknowledged was taken from The Monk. Shelley, we know, was a fervent admirer of The Monk, and many authorities believe that Shelley wrote practically the whole of this poem, The Wandering Jew, although as being Medwin's work it has been excluded (but improperly) from the more important editions of Shelley.

Medwin's poem, Ahasuerus the Wanderer, 1823, has no traces of the earlier piece.

Lewis, in addition to Schubart's poem, had read Reichardt's romance, Der Ewige Jude, 1785, and also Heller's Briefe des Ewigen Juden, two volumes, 1791. Above all, he was profoundly impressed by Schiller's Der Geisterseher, which was first printed in Die Rheinische Thalia, 1789, and which in England⁶⁰ had so powerful an influence, for as one critic asked⁶¹ : "Who can look without awe at the inscrutable Armenian, or contemplate, unless with a heart-thrill, the terrific agony which his cunning and his science are able to evoke?"

A well-known journalist of the day, Andrew Franklin, produced at Drury Lane on May 15th, 1797, The Wandering Jew; or, Love's Masquerade. This is a mere farce, "containing much low humour, and little probability,"⁶² in which Atall—the name is taken from Colley Cibber's The Double Gallant, or, The Sick Lady's Cure⁶³ —disguises himself as the Wandering Jew. That this character was chosen serves to show the popularity of Lewis' work. Franklin's scenes were received with loud laughter and applause, and when printed, octavo, 1797, the little piece ran through four editions within the year.

George Daniel, the famous book collector and critic, sweepingly enough said: "The chief merit that belongs to 'The Monk' is in bringing together an accumulation of supernatural horrors, and skilfully arranging them in an interesting tale—for it can boast of scarcely one atom of originality—it is German from beginning to end."⁶⁴

In Ludwig Herrig's Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (Alois Brandi und Heinrich Morf), Vol. CXI; new Series XI; 1903, Georg Herzfeld has an article Die eigentliche Quelle von Lewis' 'Monk' (pp. 316-323), in which he attempted to show that The Monk was for the greater part taken verbatim from an anonymous German romance Die blutende Gestalt mit Dolch und Lampe, oder die Beschwöhrung im Schlosse Stern bei Prag, Vienna and Prague,⁶⁵ no date. He quoted parallel passages as proving a word for word translation, and when his views were questioned by Otto Ritter⁶⁶ he did not hesitate to reassert and emphasize his supposed discovery.⁶⁷ Actually the whole question of priority is settled by an announcement of Die blutende Gestalt in the Weiner Zeitung, March 22nd, 1799, as "shortly to be published." Now Herzfeld's knowledge of Die blutende Gestalt was derived from an article, Ein Schauerroman als Quelle der Ahnfrau,⁶⁸ by L. Wyplel, who showed that Grillparzer's play Die Ahnfrau was taken from this source. Accordingly the editor of Grillparzer, August Sauer, compared the first German translation of The Monk by F. von Oertel, Leipzig, 1797-98 with the Prague romance, a collation which promptly established beyond all question that actually Die blutende Gestalt was derived from von Oertel's translation.⁶⁹ There are, of course, variants. Ambrosio in the German becomes a wizard astrologer; the Abbess (domina) of S. Clare is a Baroness of high lineage; the mystic myrtle is a rose-branch: names are changed; Agnes is Berta; Mother Ursula, Brigritta; and other details are altered. It is interesting to note that the anonymous author of Die blutende Gestalt published a sequel, no date (238 pages), Der Geist Lurian im Silbergewand oder das Gericht über Ambrosio.

As we have just seen, the first German translation of The Monk appeared in 1797-8; a second version was published at Berlin in 1799 as Mathilde von Villanegas, oder der weibliche Faust; a third at Magdeburg in 1806 as Der Mönch, oder die siegende Tugend; a fourth at Hamburg in 1810 as Der Mönch, Eine schauerlich abentheuerliche Geschichte. In France Le Moine, Paris, 4 volumes, 1797, was said to be translated from the fourth English edition by a mournival of names, Deschamps, Després, Benoît and Lamare; Paris, an VI (1797), 4 vols., The Monk was translated as Le Jacobin espagnol, ou Histoire du moine Ambrosio et de la belle Antonia, sa sœur; in 1838 was issued a new translation, Le Moine, said to have been made by the Abbé Morellet, who died in January, 1819; two years later Le Moine newly translated by Léon de Wailly from the first English edition was published by Delloye; in 1878 The Monk was translated as Le Moine, ou les Nuits du Cloître; in 1880 as Le Moine, ou les Nuits du Couvent; whilst in 1883 Le Moine incestueux, "roman imité de l'anglais," being in effect an abridgement of The Monk by Edouard Ploert, was published by the Libraire anticléricale. Most of these translations and adaptations ran into many editions,⁷⁰ and the popularity of The Monk in France is proved to have been quite extraordinary. In French literature the romance of Lewis had an immense influence.⁷¹ In Spain a version of The Monk, published in 1822 as El Fraile, o historia del padre Ambrosio y de la bella Antonia, is taken at second-hand from Le Jacobin espagnol. The Monk was also translated and adapted into Italian, and also (from the French) into Swedish, and other languages.

"Raymond and Agnes; or the Castle of Lindenberg," a grand and interesting ballet, taken from The Monk, and arranged for the stage, by Mr. Farley, was performed at Covent Garden with great success on March 16th, 1797. "The music of this ballet, which was interspersed with airs and choruses" was composed by William Reeve, actor, organist, and composer.⁷²

Raymond and Agnes, the Travellers benighted, or the Bleeding Nun of Lindenberg,⁷³ by Henry William Grosette, in two acts, was performed at the London minor theatres in 1809.⁷⁴ It is ascribed to Lewis himself, but this I think is doubtful, although in its kind it is an extremely skilful dramatization of the story. The principals in the printed cast are: Don Felix, Cooper; Don Raymond, F. Vining; Theodore, F. Sutton; Conrad, Sutton; Baptista, O. Smith; Robert, Grimaldi; Jaques, T. Blanchard; Claude, Turnour; Marco, T. Matthews; Agnes, Miss Cawse; Cunegonde, Mrs. Davenport; Ursula, Miss Smith; Marguerette, Mrs. W. Vining; and the Bleeding Nun, Miss Nicolls. This would seem to be a Covent Garden cast of 1826.

Raymond and Agnes, a "grand romantic English Opera in three acts," the words by Edward Fitzball, and the music by E. J. Loder, was produced in Manchester, 1855, and at the S. James' Theatre, London, on June 11th, 1859.

Aurelio and Miranda, by James Boaden, "A Drama in Five Acts with Music,"⁷⁵ produced at Drury Lane on Saturday, December 29th, 1798, was "avowedly founded on the Romance of the MONK." Boaden's attempt set out "to dramatize the leading incidents of the Romance, without recourse to supernatural agency," a vital omission which has given the whole play a completely different turn from the book, and which in my opinion by depriving the incidents of their ultimate design and dominant motif, nothing less than eviscerates Lewis' chapters, leaving a very spiritless and tame performance. On the other hand, one has to recognize that this is very much in the vein of producers who prefer to eliminate the witch-scenes from Macbeth, and would no doubt discard the Ghost from Hamlet.

Aurelio and Miranda is a mixture of prose and blank verse. The licenser of plays had obliged Boaden to change the intended name of his play Ambrosio, thus hoping no doubt to exorcise some of the freedom of the romance. Aurelio (Ambrosio) was played by Kemble, and Miranda-Eugenio (Matilda-Rosario) by Mrs. Siddons. However, in the play Miranda is no succubus, not even a witch, but the sister of Don Christoval; and when in the last scene Aurelio cries:

The secret of my noble birth reveal'd, . . .
Dispenses me from the monastic state;

Miranda promptly rejoins:

Away reserve, and maidenly resentment.

Wedding bells are distinctly heard, and the curtain falls upon what to me appears a very disgusting spectacle. The audience obviously shared my views for Kelly tells us: "It was no sooner found out that Miranda was a virtuous woman, instead of a demon, than many in the pit and galleries evinced dissatisfaction."⁷⁶

The first scene is The Cathedral Church of Madrid, "and many thought it indecorous to represent a church on the stage," finely painted though it was by Capon. Curiously enough "the powerful objection was the unearthly appearance of Kemble as the monk." It was considered sacrilegious "for Mr. Kemble, as Aurelio, to make himself look so like a divinity," to which it was wittily retorted that the play would have been all the better if Mrs. Siddons as Miranda, had only proved to be the devil. Boaden's drama was acted but six nights.

In France The Monk was frequently dramatized,⁷⁷ and the playwrights showed themselves far more mettled in their sensationalism than the English theatre. Rather than whittle away the theme like Boaden to a paltry nothing, they strove to accumulate horrors on horror's head, and they did not fall far short of their aim. In 1798, the very year that The Monk was translated into French, on the 7th nivoise an VI, in Christian language December 27th, 1797, at the Théâtre de l'Émulation was produced Le Moine a "comédie" founded upon the romance, adapted by Cammaille Saint-Aubin, "plan et pantomime de Ribié, musique de Froment." The piece, however, proved to be too extravagant and grotesque, driving melodrama headlong into the realms of farce. Not only was a ballet interpolated in the dark monastic dungeons, but at the end Ambrosio was whirled away by a monstrous hippogriff to a Phlegthontian inferno, where fiends brandishing huge links danced the hey amid showers of golden fire.

Le Moine, for all these caperings and sulphureous effects, was poorly received, and shortly after was considerably abbreviated, but even thus failed entirely to attract.

On the 30th Thermidor, an X; 17th August, 1802, at the opening of the Théâtre de la Gaieté under the direction of Ribié Le Moine was revived with alterations as a melodrama in three acts. A good deal of the ridiculous extravaganza had been wisely shorn, and, indeed, only the second act, complete in itself, of the original was presented.⁷⁸

The fact is that The Monk proves so rich in incident and adventure that the practised dramatist will choose and select from Lewis' chapters, and not attempt to bring the whole story to the boards. Thus C'est le Diable, ou la Bohemienne by Cuvelier de Tyre produced at the Ambigu on November 18th, 1798, was very successful. A little earlier, too, La Nonne de Lindenberg, ou, la Nuit merveilleuse, a tragi-comedy in five acts, by Cailleran and Coupilly, given at the Théâtre des Jeunes-Artistes on June 24th, in spite of the opposition of a fierce cabal,⁷⁹ enjoyed an amazing run.⁸⁰ From this Saint-Aubin and Ribié learned a lesson, and their next venture, an episode taken from The Monk, Marguerite, ou, les Voleurs, was in only one act.

Lewis' romance had naturally attracted the attention of the master melodramatist, Guilbert de Pixérécourt, who penned a Moine, ou la victime de l'Orgueil, which was offered to the Théâtre de la Gaieté in 1798, but not acted owing to the number of plays adapted from the English romance which were then actually running. None the less, his "drame lyrique" in two acts, La Forêt de Sicile, taken from The Monke, was produced at the Théâtre des Jeunes-Associés in the same year and achieved a veritable triumph, whilst in the following January it was transferred to the Théâtre de Montausier. The piece had caused some trouble with the authorities and was for a time prohibited, but it now appeared with various alterations and a changed catastrophe. On March 28th, 1800, Ambrosio, an anonymous drama in five acts, was given at the Odéon, and in the same year Prévost's Le Jacobin espagnol had a temporary success on the Paris stage.

As may well be believed the French theatre was sufficiently stocked from the source of The Monk for a good thirty years, but after the Revolution of July, 1830, The Monk enjoyed a veritable S. Luke's summer of popularity, for on May 28th at the Odéon, L.-M. Fontan produced Le Moine "drame fantastique en quatre actes et huit tableaux," a melodrama transferred on July 13th to the Porte-Saint-Martin. Frédéric Lemaître and Mlle. Juliette supported the leading characters. The catastrophe is better managed, but almost as outrageous as that of Saint-Aubin's play.

Le Dominicain, ou le Couvent de l'Annonciation, which was produced at the Ambigu-Comique on March 9th, 1832, was written by Fontan in collaboration with A. Chevalier. The principal rôle, Père Jéronimo, seems drawn from a mixture of Ambrosio and Schedoni. Jéronimo contrives to enclose in a convent a young girl whom he desires. When he attempts to rape her she poinards him, a little after to discover she has killed her own father.

La Nonne Sanglante, a drama in four acts by Anicet Bourgeois and J. Maillan, produced at the Porte-Saint-Martin, February 17th, 1835, only takes the figure of the nun from Lewis. Stella, who is believed dead, haunts Conrad her presumed assassin. This "grand et terrible mélodrame" concludes with a terrific conflagration. The spectacle had an immense success, and in May, 1864, was revived at the same theatre, achieving an equal popularity. The piece was judged very powerful and effective.

On October 18th, 1854, was produced at the Opéra, La Nonne Sanglante, which Gounod, who composed the music, describes in his Mémoires d'un artiste, Paris, 1896.

"Ma troisième tentative musicale au théâtre fut la Nonne sanglante, opéra en cinq actes de Scribe et Germain Delavigne . . . La Nonne Sanglante fut écrite en 1852-53; mise en répétition le 18 octobre, 1853, laissée de coté et successivement reprise à l'étude plusieurs fois, elle vit enfin la rampe le 18 octobre, 1854, un an juste après sa première répétition. Elle n'eut que onze représentations, après lesquelles Roqueplan fut remplacé à la direction de l'Opéra par M. Crosnier. Le nouveau directeur ayant déclaré qu'il ne laisserait pas jouer plus longtemps une "pareille ordure," la pièce disparut de l'affiche et n'y a plus reparu depuis. .. . Je ne sais si la Nonne Sanglante était susceptible d'un succès durable; je ne le pense pas: non que ce fut une œuvre sans effet (il en avait quelques-uns de saisissants); mais le sujet était trop uniformément sombre; il avait, en outre, l'inconvénient d'être plus qu'imaginaire, plus qu'invraisemblable: il était en dehors du possible, il reposait sur une situation purement fantastique, sans réalité, et par consequence sans intérêt dramatique."

The favourite morceaux of La Nonne Sanglante are the Marche Nuptiale; "De mes Fureurs déplorable Victime"; "Dieu nous commande l'ésperance"; "C'est Dieu qui nous appelle"; "Du Seigneur, pâle fiancée"; "Un page de ma sorte"; and "O l'erreur qui m'accable!"

A far more famous Opera than La Nonne Sanglante has borrowed important matter from The Monk, for the libretto of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, produced at the Académie Royale, Paris,⁸¹ on November 21st, 1831, was also written by Scribe and Delavigne. The fearfully impressive scene of the haunted convent, when, at the invocation of the demoniac Bertram, the abbess Elena and her troop of spectral nuns rise from their accursed tombs to dance in horrid revelry and tempt Robert to pluck the fateful talisman, the mystic branch of cypress from Berta's marble hand, the exultation of the fiends, the midnight horror and woe, all are from Lewis. This cypress bough which gains Robert admission to the apartment of the Princess Isabella, and enchains in slumber her attendance of knights and ladies, is, of course, the myrtle Matilda procures for Ambrosio. Unlike the monk, Robert resists his final temptation and refuses to sign the infernal scroll wherewith Bertram seeks to win him to himself.

It might seem difficult to decide whether it was Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Gregory Lewis who exerted the more powerful effect upon the temper and shaping of the Gothic Novel as it went its varied course, and since actually the influence of the former was far greater than that of the author of The Monk, it may appear a paradox to say that none the less it was the latter upon whom contemporary writers of fiction the more closely modelled certain prominent aspects of their work. The reason for this lies in the very practical consideration that the romances of Lewis were found to be far easier to copy, although we may add that the prentice pens showed themselves apter to reproduce and even to exaggerate his faults rather than to exhibit a tithe of his vigour and power, fastening upon his weakness and unable to reach after his strength.

The followers of both Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are legion, and very often the imitation is not only confined to theme, characters, incidents, all of which are repeated again and again in a hundred chapters with exemplary fidelity, but there are also very distinct verbal echoes to be heard, dialogue at second-hand which merely differs from the original by a bombast word inserted here and there, or a phrase dropped out for the worse.

In all essentials, it must be emphasized, Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis differ very widely from one another. They have certain romantic subject-matter in common, but so entirely opposite are their several methods of approach and treatment that although casually they may appear at some points to contact this similarity is extremely superficial and proves but a deceptive glamour of resembling. Both employ picturesque properties, convents, castles, the Holy Office. Such a figure as the austere and stately Abbess of San Stephano in The Italian, although altogether improbable and exceptional, is barely possible; such a figure as Lewis' domina of S. Clare, Mother St. Agatha, is altogether chimerical, fantastic, and absurd. Lewis recked nothing of Mrs. Radcliffe's suspense, her sensibility, her landscape pictures which are not the least lovely passages of her genius. Indeed, he pronounced these uncommonly dull, and fervently wished that they had been left out, and something substituted in their room.⁸² Certes' The Mysteries of Udolpho influenced him, but not so much as he thought and liked to make himself believe. Mrs. Radcliffe shrank from the dark diablerie of Lewis; his matricides, incests, rapes, extremely shocked her; never did she admit his mouldering cerements and atomies; his Paphian encounters would have cruddled her very ink. Her terrors were spiritual, and for that reason her influence has most clearly shown itself in the writings of those authors whose natural reserve and a certain delicacy of talent would not have tolerated the high colouring and eroticism of The Monk. By his very violence, his impassioned realism, Lewis is widely separated from Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. It is the more pity that these two great writers have been so frequently and so erroneously confounded, and their work all lumped together as if they had exhibited precisely the same characteristics, developed the same style, and elaborated the same sensationalism. It is true that in their own day many minor novelists with a curious lack of perception repeatedly endeavoured to combine Udolpho and The Monk in their pages, to make one peerless heroine of Emily and Antonia, to bring an Ambrosio Montoni upon the scene, but these attempts were foredoomed to failure; the pieces do not fit; there are awkward creaking joints, and untenoned mortises, discrepancy, contradictions even and incongruity both in the narrative and the springs of action. . . .

Notes

¹⁶ Alleyne Fitzherbert, Baron St. Helens (1753-1839), the famous diplomatist. He was envoy extraordinary at The Hague, 1789; ambassador at Madrid, 1791-94.

¹⁷ William Eden, first Baron Auckland, 1744-1814.

¹⁸ 1760-1836. He was accounted an excellent actor. Says Boaden: "I have seen no actor at all near him where he was fully himself." Oxberry considered him "the best actor on the stage." Among his many original parts were Don Ferolo Whiskerandos in The Critic, and Walter in The Children in the Wood, both of which were esteemed masterpieces.

¹⁹ In his fuliginous book with the fierce title La Carne, La Morte e il Diavolo nella letteratura romantica! (discreetly and appropriately translated, be it noted, into English as The Romantic Agony) Signor Mario Praz, amongst other errors in reference to Lewis, confuses The Monk with the first unfinished romance (see p. 60 of The Romantic Agony, English translation by Angus Davidson, 1933). I might hesitate, however, to suggest that Signor Praz is at fault, since Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in Men Without Art, p. 175, in reference to The Romantic Agony, spoke of "This gigantic pile of satanic bric-a-brac, so industriously assembled, under my directions by Professor Praz." This was repeated by Mr. Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element, p. 206. But Signor Praz wrote hotly to The Times Literary Supplement, August 8th, 1935, "to point out" that Mr. Wyndham Lewis' words were "grossly misleading." He added: "I am afraid I must disclaim the honour of being ranked as his disciple, sorry as I am to deprive him of this satisfaction." Actum est de Mr. Wyndham Lewis! After all it does not in the least matter who is responsible for such disjointed gimcrack as The Romantic Agony.

²⁰ The Sosii were celebrated booksellers in Rome. Lewis aptly has "Stockdale, Hookham, or Debrett."

²¹Monthly Magazine or British Register, March, 1796. The List of new publications. In The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839, Vol. I, p. 151, there is a bad blunder in regard to The Monk: "The first and greatest era in the literary life of Lewis was the publication of 'Ambrosio, or The Monk,' which event took place in the summer of 1795." Several writers have repeated the error that 1795 is the date of the first edition of The Monk. Thus Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, 1912, Vol. I, p. 215. Railo, The Haunted Castle, 1927, p. 89. Rudolf Schneider, Der Mönch in der englischen Dichtung bis auf Lewis's "Monk," 1795, 1927, p. 168. Herr Brauchli, Der englische Schauerroman um 1800, 1928, pp. 200, 235, 254. Miss J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, 1932, p. 278. E. A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, Vol. V (1934), p. 205. Both Baker, who is responsible for an edition of The Monk (1907), and Railo fall into a further mistake when they assert that the original title of Lewis' romance was Ambrosio, or The Monk.

²²Monthly Magazine or British Register, April, 1796.I have generally used the copy of The Monk which belonged to Francis Douce (1757-1834), and which is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Shelfmark, Douce: L. 307. This contains some interesting contemporary notes and cuttings.

²³The Pursuits of Literature. The Sixth Edition. 1798, pp. 196-7. The quotation is from Juvenal, Satire II, 121.

²⁴ Printed and Sold by S. Fisher, No. 10, St. John's Lane, Clerkenwell, also Sold by T. Hurst, No. 32, Paternoster Row. The frontispiece has "London. Pub. Decr. 4th, 1799, by S. Fisher" 98 pages. A printer's ornament on p. 4 is the same as that upon the title-page of Will's Horrid Mysteries, 4 vols., Lane, 1796.

²⁵ An interesting article upon the Bibliography of The Monk, by Mr. Louis F. Peck, The Times Literary Supplement, Thursday, March 7th, 1935, was followed by an important letter from Mr. Frederick Coykendall, who furnishes ample bibliographical details of the two issues. See also the letters in The Times Literary Supplement, 1935, of Mr. W. Roberts, March 14th; and Mr. E. G. Bayford, March 28th.

²⁶ It is not altogether easy to find a reprint of the text of the second issue of The Monk with the longer conclusion. Thus an "Unabridged Reprint of the First Edition," 2 vols., London, no date, but about 1890, has the shorter version and the Haughty Lady.

²⁷ In the nineteenth century numberless reprints of The Monk—all cheap and some clandestine—appeared as Rosario, or The Monk, and Rosario, or The Female Monk. They were often crudely illustrated with "penny dreadful" woodcuts, and were widely read by juveniles. A copy before me, London, The Temple Company (c. 1899) has: Rosario: or, The Female Monk. A Romance. (Reprinted from the Waterford Edition.) By Monk Lewis.

²⁸ 1797, Vol. II, pp. 247-8.

²⁹Byron's Works. Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, Second Impression, 1903. Vol II, p. 317, note.

³⁰ "His vanity is ouverte," said Byron of Lewis, "and yet not offending." Ibid., pp. 356-7.

³¹ Miss J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (1932), p. 278, exclaims against this "scandalous book," and informs us that "the union of lasciviousness and terror . . . was first thoroughly worked by M. G. Lewis in The Monk (1795)." I fear that this "union" assuredly did not wait until the final decade of the eighteenth century. Miss Tompkins' distaste for Lewis' work has, unfortunately, led her into several errors. She remarks, p. 245, note I, that "The Monk was begun during Lewis's stay in Germany, and finished under the influence of The Mysteries of Udolpho," which is not the case. She is not aware that so far from two-thirds of The Monk being "taken, almost word for word, from a German romance, Die Blutende Gestalt mit Dolch und Lampe," this very romance, published in 1799, is merely an adaptation of the German version of The Monk, by F. von Oertel, 1797-8. One regrets to find that, although in 1907 he furnished an Introduction to a reprint of The Monk, Dr. E. A. Baker with no uncertain sound lends his voice to the chorus of condemnation. Thus we are informed that Lewis "betrays the perverted lusts of a sadist." He had "not merely a voracious but a morbid appetite." The crimes of Ambrosio are described "with a gluttonous fullness." The episode of Agnes and Don Raymond "is treated with the same revolting frankness" as the main theme. And so on and so forth. History of the English Novel, Vol. V (1934), pp. 205-11.

³² Santon, from the Spanish santo, a Mohammedan recluse or hermit.

³³ Vol. XXIV, p. 403; 1796.

³⁴ XIX, 1796, pp. 194-200.

³⁵ February, 1799, pp. 111-15.

³⁶ LIV, 1802, p. 548.

³⁷Byron's Works, ed. cit. Letters and Journals, Vol. II, p. 368.

³⁸ Elephantis was a Greek poetess, quae libris suis expressit "Poikila tes Aphrodites kai akolasias schemata." See Suetonius, Tiberius, xliii; Martial, XII, 43; Priapeia, iii.

³⁹Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. I, pp. 154-8.

⁴⁰ I use the Sixth Edition, 1798, and the Fourteenth Edition, 1808, as representative texts.

⁴¹ 4to, 1786, for the Dillettanti Society.

⁴² Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, Vol. II, 1812, pp. 457-8. 1707 is sometimes given as the date. See also The New Monthly Magazine, 1819, July 1st, p. 512. The bibliography of the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is very obscure. The first edition, 2 vols., "for G. Fenton in the Strand," has no date, but is 1747 or 1748. The third edition is 1749. In 1750 Griffiths the bookseller (who is doubtless G. Fenton) published an expurgated edition, 12mo, as Memoirs of Fanny Hill.

There have been numberless reprints, mostly clandestine and private. The Isidore Liseux edition was published in 1888. There are at least nine French translations, and several Italian adaptations, of which one, La Meretrice, Cosmopoli (Venice), about 1764, is by Count Carlo Gozzi. A German translation, Das Frauenzimmer von Vergnugen, is given in Volume I of Priapische Romane, Berlin, 1791; Leipzig, 1860 and 1872.

⁴³ For Cleland see further New Monthly Magazine, July 1st, 1819, p. 512.

⁴⁴The Pursuits of Literature, 14th edition, 1808, p. 366. The italics are those of Mathias.

⁴⁵Ibid., p. 245, and note (b), pp. 245-6.

⁴⁶ Since I am unwilling to trench upon any theological discussion here I will merely remark in a note that I do not wish to seem to express approval of or defend the passage in The Monk which gave (perhaps not unjustifiably) offence on these grounds.

⁴⁷ Praz, The Romantic Agony, English translation, 1933, pp. 180-1, suggests that this incident may have inspired a passage (omitted from the final text) in Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine: "Il ouvre son missel et regarde l'image de la Vierge," whereupon the devil whispers obscene thoughts in the Saint's ear.

⁴⁸ Only Miss Birkhead, The Tale of Terror, 1921, p. 67, seems to have noticed that with regard to Matilda "Lewis changes his mind about her character during the course of the book, and fails to make her early history consistent with the ending of the story."

⁴⁹ In a famous passage which gave great scandal. Rather than have allowed Antonia to read certain episodes of the Old Testament, Elvira "would have preferred putting into her daughter's hands Amadis de Gaul, or The Valiant Champion, Tirante the White; and would sooner have authorized her studying the lewd exploits of Don Galaor, or the lascivious jokes of Damsel Plazerdimivida" Lewis had the names from Don Quixote's library, Don Quixote, Part I, chapters i and vi. Don Galaor is the brother of Amadis de Gaul. Plazirdemavida is a maid of honour to the Princess Carmesina in Tirante the White.

⁵⁰ It was even suggested that he had taken the incident of the Bleeding Nun from a romance of Madame de Genlis, Les Chevaliers du Cygne, Hamburg, 3 vols., 1795. Two friends, Isambard and Oliver, pass the night at an inn, and the former hears gentle footsteps in his companion's room, whilst a voice murmurs: "Olivier! C'est en vain que tu veux me fuir; je te suivrai partout." Later attempting to catch a glimpse of this nocturnal visitant, Isambard is horrified to see a carious skeleton, all dabbled with blood, whilst tortured groans disturb the air. Tome I, ch. vi, p. 41; and ch. vii, pp. 60-2. Lewis however, explicitly stated that he had not read Les Chevaliers du Cygne until The Monk was printed and just about to appear, as indeed the several dates of the French and English romances amply demonstrate. Madame de Genlis was in fact drawing upon the same story by Musaeus as Lewis used.

Praz, The Romantic Agony, p. 209, imagines that the Bleeding Nun may have been the original of Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse!

⁵¹ 1735-87.

⁵² Also 8vo, 1708. Graesse, Bibliotheca Magica, Leipzig, 1843, pp. 86, 130, 134. For a reproduction of the frontispiece of this rare book see Soldan-Heppe, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, München, 1912, Band II, 376.

⁵³ Vol. XXIII, p. 451.

⁵⁴ Otto Ritter, in an article "Studien zu M. G. Lewis' Roman 'Ambrosio or the Monk,'" Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen and Literaturen, Band CXI (New Series XI), 1903, pp. 106-21, is rather belated in drawing attention to these similarities. The influence of Bürger on Lewis' ballads the author of The Monk was proud openly to acknowledge. To talk of the compact with the Demon as a "Faust-theme" seems a little absurd, in view of the many historical records of such horrid bargains. See my History of Witchcraft and Geography of Witchcraft, passim.

⁵⁵ Born November 25th, 1762; died January 8th, 1835.

⁵⁶ Published in 1753.

⁵⁷ Such plays as The Woodman's Hut and The Miller and bis Men obviously owe their inspiration to Lewis.

⁵⁸Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. I, pp. 60-1.

⁵⁹ I have not, of course, attempted to do more than barely touch the fringe of the subject. There should further be consulted Neubaur's Die Sage von ewigen Juden, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1893; Albert Soergel's Ahasver-Dichtungen seit Goethe, 1905; and (for literary allusions) Theodor Kapstein, Ahasverus in der Weltpossie, Berlin, 1906. Miss Alice M. Killen has a study L'évolution de la légende du Juif errant in the Revue de littérature comparée, January-March, 1925, pp. 5-36. Of romances upon the subject of, or which introduce the Wandering Jew, among the most famous is Le Juif Errant (1845), of Marie-Joseph-Eugène Sue, who read and was influenced by The Monk.

⁶⁰ The earliest English translation was 1795, "The GhostSeer, or Apparitionist, an interesting fragment." Lewis, of course, knew the original.

⁶¹ Standard Novels, Colburn and Bentley, No. IX, 1831, The Ghost-Seer, Vol. I, p. 8.

⁶²Biographia Dramatica, 1812, Vol. III, p. 389; No. 9.

⁶³ Produced at the Haymarket on November 1st, 1707. 4to, 1707. This comedy was a stock play throughout the eighteenth century, and was revived at the Haymarket as late as March, 1848. Although he has served the dish cleverly enough, Cibber (as his wont) offers far from original fare. Atall, the "Double Gallant," masquerades as Mr. Freeman and Colonel Standfast.

⁶⁴Cumberland's British Theatre, Vol. XV, 1827, The Castle Spectre, Remarks, p. 10. Of great significance and importance as were German influences upon the Gothic novel in general, and upon Lewis in particular, it is, of course, possible disproportionately to overstress this point at the expense of the originality of British authors. Thus in his The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade, 1934, p. 101, Note, Mr. Geoffrey Gorer criticizes M. Maurice Heine, who "claims priority for de Sade in the use of Gothic trappings to the adventure novel, on the historical ground of the dates of his books, compared with those of Mrs. Radcliffe and 'Monk' Lewis." Mr. Gorer proceeds: "This seems to me difficult to justify, when the work of Clara Reeve and the wide diffusion of such German books as Boden's Children of the Abbey are taken into account." Clara Reeve (1729-1807) wrote: Original Poems (1769); The Phœnix (1772); The Champion of Virtue (1777), reprinted as The Old English Baron (1778); The Two Mentors (1783); The Progress of Romance (1785); The Exiles (1789); The School for Widows (1791); Plans of Education (1792); Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon (1793); and Destination: or Memoirs of A Private Family (1799). Fatherless Fanny is not by Clara Reeve. Horace Walpole writing to the Rev. William Mason upon April 8th, 1778, jeered The Old English Baron as Otranto "reduced to reason and probability! It is so probable, that any trial for murder at the Old Bailey would make a more interesting story." In the same letter he damns it as a "caput mortuum," Walpole's Letters, ed. Toynbee, Vol. X, Oxford, 1904, pp. 216-17. Again (ibid, p. 302) Walpole speaks of The Old English Baron as "stripped of the marvellous" and "the most insipid dull nothing you ever saw." Miss J. M. S. Tompkins hits the mark when she emphasizes the "homely and practical streak that differentiates The Old English Baron from any other Gothic story whatever," The Popular Novel in England, 1932, p. 229. She further (p. 231) points out that Clara Reeve's Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon "is wholly unlike the Gothic Romances in the middle of which it appeared" (1793). Professor Raleigh, in The English Novel (fifth edition, 1904, p. 227), justly observes that Miss Reeve deliberately diluted romance with prosiness. "In her relation to the romantic movement she thus appears as a reactionary." In fact Mr. Gorer has made such an extremely bad shot when he hazarded "the work of Clara Reeve" that one must be excused if one doubts whether he has any acquaintance at all with this lady's writing.

"Such German books as Boden's Children of the Abbey." This sentence I frankly do not understand. Is Boden the German author from whom a book anglicè, "Children of the Abbey," was translated? Is Boden the English translator? What is the German title of the book which he translated? Who is this Boden? Is he Joseph Boden, the Indian judge-advocate, who founded the Boden professorship of Sanscrit at Oxford?

The Children of the Abbey, 4 vols., 1798, is by Mrs. Regina Maria Roche, née Dalton. It is certainly not a "terror" but a "sensibility" novel, and was an especial favourite, being frequently reprinted until at least the end of the nineteenth century. It is British to the core, in every page, in every turn. I have never heard of, nor can I find a German original, if that is what Mr. Gorer intends. One is entitled, I think, to express some scepticism, but should a German novel exist—whether or not by Boden—from which Mrs. Roche translated her The Children of the Abbey, I shall be most interested to learn all details, and I await the reading of the book with considerable curiosity.

⁶⁵ Wien und Prag bey Franz Haas; 262 pages. A copy is to be found in the Wiener Stadtbibliothek.

⁶⁶ In an article, Die angebliche Quelle von M. G. Lewis' "Monk"; Archiv fur das Studium, Vol. CXIII, pp. 56-65.

⁶⁷Noch einmal die Quelle des "Monk"; Archiv, Vol. CXV, pp. 70-3.

⁶⁸Euphorion, VII, p. 725.

⁶⁹ Sauer, Grillparzers Werke, I, 1909, definitely proves that the German romance is merely an adaptation of certain chapters from The Monk. Rudolf Schneider, in his very superficial compilation, Der Mönch in der englischen Dichtung bis auf Lewis's "Monk," 1795, Leipzig, 1928 (Palaestra 155), pp. 168-75, repeats Herzfeld's errors at some length. His list of Titles influenced by The Monk is faulty to a degree. Evidently he had no knowledge of the books he catalogues in the most haphazard way. Misled by the word "Recluse," he regards Zara Wentworth's The Recluse of Albyn Hall (which he calls Albin Hall) as a clerical novel, and he obviously takes Mrs. Meeke's Veiled Protectress for a nun!

⁷⁰ Alice M. Killen, Le Roman Terrifiant, Paris, 1923, Bibliographie, pp. 227-8.

⁷¹ Fernand Baldensperger, Le Moine de Lewis dans la Littérature française', Journal of Comparative Literature, 1903.

⁷² M. J. Young, Memoirs of Mrs. Crouch, 1806, Vol. II, p. 257. S. M. Ellis, The Life of Michael Kelly, 1930, p. 259. note 1.

⁷³ Cumberland's British Theatre, No. 38. Also Dicks'Standard Plays, No. 268.

⁷⁴ At Norwich, November 22nd, 1809.

⁷⁵ 8vo., 1798 (bis); Third Edition, 8vo, 1799. Pub. Bell.

⁷⁶ S. M. Ellis, The Life of Michael Kelly, 1930, pp. 258-9.

⁷⁷ Alexis Pitou has an interesting article, Les Origines du mélodrame français à la fin du XVIII siècle, in the Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, 1911.

Prosper Mérimée's Une Femme est un Diable, which certainly borrows the central idea from The Monk, was published in his Théâtre de Clara Gazul, 1825, and designed for the closet.

⁷⁸ Alexis Pitou in the Revue d'Histoire littéraire, 1911, pp. 279-80.

⁷⁹Chronique des petits théâtres de Paris, torn. I, p. 214.

⁸⁰ Ch.-M. Des Granges, Geoffrey et la critique dramatique, p. 402.

⁸¹ It was almost immediately given in England under various piratical forms. Edward Fitzball and J. B. Buckstone were first in the field with a Musical Drama, Robert le Diable; or, The Devil's Son, Adelphi Theatre, January 23rd, 1832. A few weeks later, on February 13th, Sadlers Wells followed with a burletta, Robert le Diable; or, The Devil's Son. On Monday, February 20th, 1832, The Demon Duke; or, The Mystic Branch, was produced at Drury Lane, and the following night, Tuesday, Covent Garden gave The Fiend Father; or Robert of Normandy. The Royal Pavilion presented a burletta, The Demon Father; or The Devil and his Son, on March 12th, 1832.

Robert le Diable was produced in French at Her Majesty's on June 11th, 1832; and in Italian at the same theatre on May 4th, 1847, when Jenny Lind in the rôle of Alice made her first London appearance. On March 1st, 1845, this "great Catholic work," as it has been aptly termed, arranged by Bunn, had been given at Drury Lane. The more recent English adaptation of the libretto is by John Oxenford.

Mlle. Taglioni won a supreme triumph by her mystic dance as the Abbess Elena in Robert le Diable.

⁸² Lewis in a letter from The Hague to his mother, May 18th, 1794. Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. I, p. 123. . . .