Matthew Gregory Lewis, who professed to have translated this romance

out of the German, very much, I believe, as Horace Walpole professed

to have taken The Castle of Otranto from an old Italian manuscript,

was born in 1775 of a wealthy family. His father had an estate in

India and a post in a Government office. His mother was daughter to

Sir Thomas Sewell, Master of the Rolls in the reign of George III.

She was a young mother; her son Matthew was devoted to her from the

first. As a child he called her "Fanny," and as a man held firmly

by her when she was deserted by her husband. From Westminster

School, M. G. Lewis passed to Christ Church, Oxford. Already he was

busy over tales and plays, and wrote at college a farce, never

acted, a comedy, written at the age of sixteen, The East Indian,

afterwards played for Mrs. Jordan's benefit and repeated with great

success, and also a novel, never published, called The Effusions of

Sensibility, which was a burlesque upon the sentimental school. He

wrote also what he called "a romance in the style of The Castle of

Otranto," which appeared afterwards as the play of The Castle

Spectre.

With his mind thus interested in literature of the romantic form,

young Lewis, aged seventeen, after a summer in Paris, went to

Germany, settled for a time at Weimar, and, as he told his mother,

knocked his brains against German as hard as ever he could. "I have

been introduced," he wrote, in July, 1792, "to M. de Goethe, the

celebrated author of Werter, so you must not be surprised if I

should shoot myself one of these fine mornings." In the spring of

1793 the youth returned to England, very full of German romantic

tale and song, and with more paper covered with wild fancies of his

own. After the next Christmas he returned to Oxford. There was a

visit to Lord Douglas at Bothwell Castle; there was not much

academic work done at Oxford. His father's desire was to train him

for the diplomatic service, and in the summer of 1794 he went to the

Hague as attache to the British Embassy. He had begun to write his

novel of The Monk, had flagged, but was spurred on at the Hague by a

reading of Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, a book after his

own heart, and he wrote to his mother at this time, "You see I am

horribly bit by the rage of writing."

The Monk was written in ten weeks, and published in the summer of

1795, before its author's age was twenty. It was praised, attacked,

said by one review to have neither originality, morals, nor

probability to recommend it, yet to have excited and to be

continuing to excite the curiosity of the public: a result set down

to the "irresistible energy of genius." Certainly, Lewis did not

trouble himself to keep probability in view; he amused himself with

wild play of a fancy that delighted in the wonderful. The

controversy over The Monk caused the young author to be known as

Monk Lewis, and the word Monk has to this day taken the place of the

words Matthew Gregory so generally, that many catalogue-makers must

innocently suppose him to have been so named at the font. The

author of The Monk came back from the Hague to be received as a

young lion in London society. When he came of age he entered

Parliament for Hindon, in Wiltshire, but seldom went to the House,

never spoke in it, and retired after a few sessions. His delight

was in the use of the pen; his father, although disappointed by his

failure as a statesman, allowed him a thousand a year, and he took a

cottage at Barnes, that he might there escape from the world to his

ink-bottle. He was a frequent visitor at Inverary Castle, and was

fascinated by his host's daughter, Lady Charlotte Campbell. Still

he wrote on. The musical drama of The Castle Spectre was produced

in the year after The Monk, and it ran sixty nights. He translated

next Schiller's Kabale und Liebe as The Minister, but it was not

acted till it appeared, with little success, some years afterwards

at Covent Garden as The Harper's Daughter. He translated from

Kotzebue, under the name of Rolla, the drama superseded by

Sheridan's version of the same work as Pizarro. Then came the

acting, in 1799, of his comedy written in boyhood, The East Indian.

Then came, in the same year, his first opera, Adelmorn the Outlaw;

then a tragedy, Alfonso, King of Castile. Of the origin of this

tragedy Lewis gave a characteristic account. "Hearing one day," he

said, "my introduction of negroes into a feudal baron's castle" (in

The Castle Spectre) "exclaimed against with as much vehemence as if

a dramatic anachronism had been an offence undeserving of benefit of

clergy, I said in a moment of petulance, that to prove of how little

consequence I esteemed such errors, I would make a play upon the

Gunpowder Plot, and make Guy Faux in love with the Emperor

Charlemagne's daughter. By some chance or other, this idea fastened

itself upon me, and by dint of turning it in my mind, I at length

formed the plot of Alfonso."




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