Born, in London, 9 July 1775. At Westminster School, June 1783 to 1790. Matric., Ch. Ch., Oxford, 27 April 1790; B.A., 1794; M.A., 1797. Visit to Paris, 1791; to Weimar, autumn 1792–93. Attaché to British Embassy at the Hague, 1794. M.P., for Hindon, 1796–1802. Play, “The Castle Spectre,” produced at Drury Lane, 14 Dec. 1797; “The East Indian” (afterwards called “Rich and Poor”), Drury Lane, 24 April 1799; “Adelmorn,” Drury Lane, 4 May 1801; “Alphonso,” Covent Garden, 15 Jan. 1802; “The Captive,” Covent Garden, 1803; “The Harper’s Daughter,” Covent Garden, 4 May 1803; “Rugantino,” Covent Garden, 1805; “Adelgitha,” Drury Lane, 1807; “The Wood Demon” (afterwards called “One o’clock”), Covent Garden, 1807; “Venoni,” Drury Lane, 1 Dec. 1808; “Timour the Tartar,” Covent Garden, 29 April, 1811. In West Indies, Jan. to March 1816. In Italy, May 1816 to Dec. 1817. In West Indies, Feb. to May 1818. Sailed for England, 4 May; died at sea, 14 May 1818. Works: “The Monk” (anon.), 1796: “Village Virtues” (anon.), 1796; “The Castle Spectre,” 1798; “Tales of Terror,” 1799 [?]; “The Love of Gain” (from Juvenal), 1799; “The East Indian,” 1799; “Adelmorn,” 1801 (2nd edn. same year); “Alfonso, King of Castile,” 1801; “Tales of Wonder” (with Scott and Southey), 1801; “Adelgitha,” 1806; “Feudal Tyrants,” 1806; “Romantic Tales,” 1808; “Venoni,” 1809; “One o’clock,” 1811; “Timour the Tartar,” 1812; “Poems,” 1812; “Koenigsmark the Robber” [1815]?. Posthumous: “Raymond and Agnes” [1820?]; “The Isle of Devils,” 1827; “Journal of a West Indian Proprietor,” 1834; “My Uncle’s Garret Window,” 1841. He translated: Schiller’s “The Minister” (“Kabale and Liebe”), 1798; Kotzebue’s “Rolla,” 1799; Zschokke’s “The Bravo of Venice” (Abellino), 1805. Life: “Life and Correspondence” (2 vols.), 1839.

Personal

  Talked of poor Monk Lewis: his death was occasioned by taking emetics for seasickness, in spite of the advice of those about him. He died lying on the deck. When he was told all hope was over, he sent his man down below for pen, ink, and paper; asked him to lend him his hat; and upon that, as he lay, wrote a codicil to his will. Few men, once so talked of, have ever produced so little sensation by their death. He was ruining his Negroes in Jamaica, they say, by indulgence, for which they suffered severely as soon as his back was turned; but he has enjoined it to his heirs, as one of the conditions of holding his estate, that the Negroes were to have three additional holidays in the year.

  Lewis was a good man, a clever man, but a bore…. My only revenge or consolation used to be, setting him by the ears with some vivacious person who hated bores, especially, M^e. de Stael or Hobhouse, for example. But I liked Lewis: he was a jewel of a man had he been better set. I don’t mean personally, but less tiresome, for he was tedious, as well as contradictory to every thing and every body.

  He did much good by stealth, and was a most generous creature…. Lewis was fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or as a man of fashion. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of any one who had a title. You would have sworn he had been a parvenu of yesterday, yet he had lived all his life in good society…. Mat had queerish eyes—they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish—he was indeed the least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made…. This boyishness went through life with him. He was a child, and a spoilt child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost-stories and German romances. He had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met with—finer than Byron’s.

  This good-natured fopling, the pet and plaything of certain fashionable circles.

  A very odd fellow! One of the best of men, if he had not had a trick of writing profane and indecent books. Excellent son; excellent master; and in the most trying circumstances; for he was the son of a vile brace of parents, and the master of a stupid, ungrateful gang of negroes.

  Monk Lewis was a great favourite at Oaklands. One day after dinner, as the Duchess was leaving the room, she whispered something into Lewis’s ear. He was much affected, his eyes filling with tears. We asked what was the matter. “Oh,” replied Lewis, “the Duchess spoke so very kindly to me!”—“My dear fellow,” said Colonel Armstrong, “pray don’t cry; I daresay she didn’t mean it.”

  In poetry he is a good imitator of the worst style of a very ingenious but fantastic school of Germans. To many even then it was a matter of astonishment how a ludicrously little and overdressed mannikin (the fac-simile of Lovel in “Evelina”), “with eyes projecting like those of some insects, and flattish in the orbits,” should be the lion of London literary society, and how the Prince of Dandies should have a taste for the weird and wonderful, and be the first to transfer to English the spirit of some of the early German bards.

  When he was still a schoolboy, quarrels arose in his home, which resulted in a separation between his parents, and the pretty, proud, frivolous mother, left her husband’s house. Henceforward, the precocious boy became her affectionate friend, protector, and champion, dividing his schoolboy means with her, when her thoughtless expenditure had exhausted her own, writing her long tender letters about all that was going on, sympathising, guiding, deferring to her opinion, confiding all his plans, literary and otherwise, to her. A more touching picture could not be than that of this curious pair, in themselves so imperfect, the faded, extravagant, foolish, but loving mother, and her fat little undergraduate, so sensible, so tender, so constant, so anxious to anticipate all her wants, scarcely betraying the consciousness that these wants are sometimes unreasonable, and while he pours out all his heart to her, still remaining loyally just and faithful to the father, whose liberality he will not hear impugned.

The Monk

  There is one publication at 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 systematick 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.” 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.

  Himself (Lewis) a poet of no mean calibre. The ballads and little pieces, scattered throughout his novel of the “Monk,” were, in their day, the most popular things known. They were chanted in the street and in the drawing-room; while the subject of the most terrific (“Alonzo and Imogene”), and many episodes in the novel, were represented on the stage.

  The brushwood splendour of “The Monk’s” fame.

  We should be disposed to say now that it is hardly up to the mark of a “penny dreadful,” even in point of literary merit. The horrors are of the crudest description, and there is neither character nor force of writing to redeem them. Mrs. Radcliffe is incomparably superior. There must have been something in the contrast between the fat little boyish person, blubber lips and beady eyes, of the author and the atrocities he lisped forth so innocently, which tickled Society. It is scarcely possible to conceive any more serious reason for his fame.

  Lewis’s acquaintance with literature, and especially with the German resuscitations of feudalism, monasticism, ghosts, and hobgoblins, enabled him to fill his museum of atrocities with a large variety of articles of vertu, including the Inquisition, the wandering Jew, and the bleeding nun, But his imagination is gross, boyish, and vulgar, and his horrors rests mainly on a physical basis. He was foolish enough to throw over all the restraints that Mrs. Radcliffe had observed, and to attempt explicit climax.

  “The Monk” used, and abused, the now familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Spanish grandees, heroines of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted chambers, wainscoted in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock tolled one, the spectre of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand. There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping portions; beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sistes were immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the loathsome relics of the dead. With all this, “The Monk” is a not wholly contemptible work. There is a certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of “The Castle of Otranto.” And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which distinguishes that very prolix narrator.

General

  As a man of truly original powers, M. G. Lewis was far behind either Godwin or Coleridge, and stood much on the level of his successor Maturin: but what his imagination lacked in grandeur was made up by energy: he was a high-priest of the intense school. Monstrous and absurd in many things, as were the writings of Lewis, no one could say that they were deficient in interest. Truth and nature, to be sure, he held utterly at arm’s-length; but, instead, he had a life-in-death vigour, a spasmodic energy, which answered well for all purposes of astonishment.

  One of his best novels was “The Bravo of Venice,” published in 1804…. He contrives to make this hero respected, even admired to a degree; and artfully employs the poetry and witchery of Venice, that unique city in the world,—half land, half sea,—to give a tinge of appropriateness and even congruity to his wild romance. The “Bravo” is as good a specimen of the improbable and yet conceivable as any work of fiction earlier than Scott.

  As Crabbe may serve to represent the extreme of naturalism in art, so “Monk” Lewis may serve to represent the other extreme, the extravagance of the romantic tendency.

  Nothing can be worse in kind, and nothing, of its kind, can well be better than “Alonso the Brave.” It was Lewis’s rôle to fling the orts and refuse of German Romanticism about the soil of England. It was his luck rather than merit to have once or twice thrown them where they nourished good seed, and now and then to have grasped a flower among his handfuls of treasured weeds. His false ballads helped to elicit the true ones of Scott, and the respectable ones of Southey, and he introduced to the author of “Manfred” what he doubtless regarded as that capital “Tale of Wonder,” Goethe’s “Faust.”

  It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter Scott’s should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like Lewis.