utting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the
change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . .
Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the
poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my
bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy
track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and
matted hair. Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the
long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant."

"The Monk" won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, assisted
no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend
himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed
from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the _Guardian_ (No. 148). But
the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney
General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion
so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions.
Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14,
1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting
play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is
strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play
is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised
the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been
said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not
advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have
exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by Mr.
Wroughton, invokes "the fair enchantress, Romance":

"The moonstruck child of genius and of woe,"

who

"--Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light:
The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night
Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp
Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp,
Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers,
Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours."

The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl
Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an
incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus
soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because
my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those
pleasures sought so