there is any
resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own. I
confess that it struck me." This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness
between Anne Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic
personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of Lewis, by
Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House. "The artist had
ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was
half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with
all this, the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand
to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general
voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis! Why,
that picture's like a man.'" "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, wainscoated 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 specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand.
There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions;
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 sisters 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. There is nothing strictly
mediaeval about it. The knight in armor cuts no figure and the
historical period is not precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical
features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though
but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher
of the convent, of th