among the
novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he
were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly
celebrated) books of the kind in English. The others fall quite out of
comparison. _The Fatal Revenge_ or the _Family of Montorio_ (1807) is a
try for the "furthest" in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding
indeed the crudity of _The Monk_, but altogether neglecting the
restraint of _Udolpho_ and its companions in the use of the
supernatural. _The Wild Irish Boy_ (1808), _The Milesian Chief_ (1812),
_Women_ (1818), and _The Albigenses_ (1824) are negligible, the last,
perhaps, rather less so than the others. But _Melmoth the Wanderer_
(1820) is in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty--especially
a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, "a
considerable part of the book consists of a story told to a certain
person, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscript
which is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part of
the novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of the
title-hero." Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has been
frequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century and
naturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though not
exactly new, is impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner more
impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a little
suggestion from _Vathek_. Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devil
for something like immortality and other privileges, including the
unusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargain
off his hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in which
Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the love
interest of the book--the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for
a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora--is related with some real
pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and
twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own
generation very powerfully: his influence being so great in France that
Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are
constant references to the book in the early French Romantics. In fact
for this kind of "sensation" Maturin is, putting _Vathek_ aside, quite
the chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful whether he had many
other gifts as a n