ewis" (2
vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis' favorite books was "Glanvil
on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose "Vanity of
Dogmatizing,"[34] and "Sadduceismus Triumphatus" rebuked the doubter and
furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's "Wonders of the Invisible World"
(1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and
whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night
in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of
"The Drummer." Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil's
pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly
the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr.
Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging
to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood,
there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. "In maturer years,"
says his biographer, "Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at
night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his
dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting
to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose
some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the
ghastly machinery of his works."

Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was "Ambrosio, or the Monk"
(1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal
descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford in 1792,
describing it in a letter to his mother as "a romance in the style of
'The Castle of Otranto.'" But in the summer of the same year he went to
Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to
Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the
_Sturm- und Drangperiode_. For years Lewis was one of the most active
intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the
English literary market. He fed the stage with melodramas and operas,
and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35]
Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and
finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. "I was induced to go on with it," he
wrote to his mother, "by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' which is, in
my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been
published. . . When you read it, tell me whether you think