r island,
finds her way into Spain where she is married to the
aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost
of a murdered domestic being the witness of her
nuptials; and finally dies in a dungeon of the
Inquisition at Madrid. To complete this phantasmagoric
exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers,
parricides, maniacs in abundance, monks with scourges
pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood;
subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their
wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning, Irish
hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna
Claras and Donna Isidoras--all exposed to each other in
violent and glaring contrast and all their adventures
narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid,
vehement, and painfully elaborated language."[65]

This breathless sentence gives some conception of the delirious
imagery of Maturin's romance, but the book is worthy of a more
respectful, unhurried survey. _Melmoth_ shows a distinct advance
on _Montorio_ in constructive power. Each separate story is
perfectly clear and easy to follow, in spite of the elaborate
interlacing. The romance opens with the death of a miser in a
desolate Irish farmstead, with harpies clustering at his bedside.
His nephew and heir, John Melmoth, is adjured to destroy a
certain manuscript and a portrait of an ancestor with eyes "such
as one feels they wish they had never seen and feels they can
never forget." Alone at midnight, John Melmoth reads the
manuscript, which is reputed to have been written by Stanton, an
English traveller in Spain, about 1676. The document relates a
startling story of a mysterious Englishman who appears at a
Spanish wedding with disastrous consequences, and reappears
before Stanton in a madhouse offering release on dreadful
conditions. After reading it, John Melmoth decides to burn the
family portrait. He is visited by a sinister form, who proves
that he is no figment of the imagination by leaving black and
blue marks on his relative's wrist. The next night a ship is
wrecked in a storm. The Wanderer appears, and mocks the victims
with fiendish mirth. The sole survivor, Don Alonzo Moncada,
unfolds his story to John Melmoth. The son of a great duke, he
has been forced to become a monk to save his mother's honour. He
dwells with the excruciating detail in which Maturin is inclined
to revel, on the horrors of Spa