Having said this, he departed, leaving me in astonishment at the mysterious turn of his manner and conversation. His assurances that I should soon be relieved from the apparition's visits produced a good effect upon my constitution. Theodore, whom I rather treated as an adopted child than a domestic, was surprised, at his return, to observe the amendment in my looks. He congratulated me on this symptom of returning health, and declared himself delighted at my having received so much benefit from my conference with the Great Mogul [so called; really the Wandering Jew]. Upon inquiry I found that the stranger had already passed eight days in Ratisbon. According to his own account, therefore, he was only to remain there six days longer. Saturday was still at a distance of three. Oh, with what impatience did I expect its arrival! In MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS. From the Portrait by H. W. Pickersgill, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. the interim, the bleeding nun continued her nocturnal visits; but hoping soon to be released from them altogether, the effects which they produced on me became less violent than before. The wished-for night arrived. To avoid creating suspicion, I retired to bed at my usual hour; but as soon as my attendants had left me, I dressed myself again, and prepared for the stranger's reception. He entered my room upon the turn of midnight. A small chest was in his hand, which he placed near the stove. He saluted me without speaking; I returned the compliment, observing an equal silence. He then opened the chest. The first thing which he produced was a small wooden crucifix; he sank upon his knees, gazed upon it mournfully, and cast his eyes towards heaven. He seemed to be praying devoutly. At length he bowed his head respectfully, kissed the crucifix thrice, and quitted his kneeling posture. He next drew from the chest a covered goblet; with the liquor which it contained, and which appeared to be blood, he sprinkled the floor; and then dipping in it one end of the crucifix, he described a circle in the middle of the room. Round about this he placed various reliques, skulls, thighbones, &c. I observed that he disposed them all in the form of crosses. Lastly, he took out a large Bible, and beckoned me to follow him into the circle. I obeyed. 'Be cautious not to utter a syllable!' whispered the stranger: 'step not out of the circle, and as you love yourself, dare not to look upon my face.' Holding the crucifix in one hand, the Bible in the other, he seemed to read with profound attention. The clock struck one; as usual, I heard the spectre's steps upon the staircase, but I was not seized with the accustomed shivering. I waited her approach with confidence. She entered the room, drew near the circle, and stopped. The stranger muttered some words, to me unintelligible. Then raising his head from the book, and extending the crucifix towards the ghost, he pronounced in a voice distinct and solemn: Beatrice! Beatrice! Beatrice!' What wouldst thou?' replied the apparition in a hollow faltering tone. What disturbs thy sleep? Why dost thou afflict and torture this youth? How can rest be restored to thy unquiet spirit?' 'I dare not tell; I must not tell. Fain would I repose in my grave, but stern commands force me to prolong my punishment!' 'Knowest thou this blood? Knowest thou in whose veins it flowed? Beatrice! Beatrice! in his name I charge thee to answer me.' 'I dare not disobey my taskers.' 'Darest thou disobey me?' He spoke in a commanding tone, and drew the sable band from his forehead. In spite of his injunction to the contrary, curiosity would not suffer me to keep my eyes off his face: I raised them, and beheld a burning cross impressed upon his brow. For the horror with which this object inspired me I cannot account, but I never felt its equal. My senses left me for some moments; a mysterious dread overcame my courage; and had not the exorciser caught my hand, I should have fallen out of the circle. When I recovered myself, I perceived that the burning cross had produced an effect no less violent upon the spectre. Her countenance expressed reverence and horror, and her visionary limbs were shaken by fear. 'Yes,' she said at length, 'I tremble at that mark! I respect it! I obey you! Know, then, that my bones lie still unburied-they rot in the obscurity of Lindenberg-hole. None but this youth has the right of consigning them to the grave. His own lips have made over to me his body and his soul; never will I give back his promise; never shall he know a night devoid of terror unless he engages to collect my mouldering bones, and deposit them in the family vault of his Andalusian castle. Then let thirty masses be said for the repose of my spirit, and I trouble this world no more. Now let me depart; those flames are scorching.' He let the hand drop slowly which held the crucifix, and which till then he had pointed towards her. The apparition bowed her head, and her form melted into air. A Welcome from his Negroes. As soon as the carriage entered my gates, the uproar and confusion which ensued sets all description at defiance. The works were instantly all abandoned; everything that had life came flocking to the house from all quarters; and not only the men, and the women, and the children, but, by a bland assimilation,' the hogs, and the dogs, and the geese, and the fowls, and the turkeys, all came hurrying along by instinct, to see what could possibly be the matter, and seemed to be afraid of arriving too late. Whether the pleasure of the negroes was sincere may be doubted; but, certainly, it was the loudest that I ever witnessed; they all talked together, sang, danced, shouted, and, in the violence of their gesticulations, tumbled over each other, and rolled about upon the ground. Twenty voices at once inquired after uncles and aunts, and grandfathers and great-grandmothers of mine, who had been buried long before I was in existence, and whom, I verily believe, most of them only knew by tradition. One woman held up her little naked black child to me, grinning from ear to ear'Look, massa, look here! him nice lilly neger for massa!' Another complained-'So long since none come see we, massa; good massa come at last.' As for the old people, they were all in one and the same story: now they had lived once to see massa, they were ready for dying tomorrow them no care.' The shouts, the gaiety, the wild laughter, their strange and sudden bursts of singing and dancing, and several old women, wrapped up in large cloaks, their heads bound round with differentcoloured handkerchiefs, leaning on a staff, and standing motionless in the middle of the hubbub, with their eyes fixed upon the portico which I occupied, formed an exact counterpart of the festivity of the witches in Macbeth. Nothing could be more odd or more novel than the whole scene; and yet there was something in it by which I could not help being affected. Perhaps it was the consciousness that all these human beings were my slaves. Durandarte and Belerma. Sad and fearful is the story On those fatal plains of glory Seven long years I served thee, fair one, 'And when now thy heart, replying 'Ah! though young I fall, believe me, 'Oh! my cousin, Montesinos, 'When my soul, these limbs forsaking, From my breast the cold heart taking, 'Say, I of my lands possessor 'Twice a week, too, how sincerely 6 Montesinos, now the hour 'Eyes, which forth beheld me going, 'Thy kind hand my eyelids closing, Thus spoke gallant Durandarte; Bitter weeping, Montesinos Took from him his helm and glaive; To perform his promise made, he Sad was Montesinos' heart, he 'Cousin, lo! my tears bedew thee; How shall I thy loss survive? Wherefore left he me alive?' Matilda fascinates Ambrosio by singing this ballad to him, accompanying herself on the harp; that which follows is read, not without qualms of discomfort, in a lonely room at dead of night, out of an old book of Spanish ballads, by Antonia, another of Ambrosio's victims, whom Matilda, after he tired of her, obligingly put in his power by sorcery. Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene. They gazed on each other with tender delight: 'And, oh!' said the youth, 'since to-morrow I go Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow, 'Oh! hush these suspicions,' Fair Imogene said, 'Offensive to love and to me; For, if you be living, or if you be dead, I swear by the Virgin that none in your stead 'If e'er I, by lust or by wealth led aside, Forget my Alonzo the Brave, God grant that, to punish my falsehood and pride, To Palestine hastened the hero so bold, His love she lamented him sore; But scarce had a twelvemonth elapsed, when, behold! His treasures, his presents, his spacious domain, He dazzled her eyes, he bewildered her brain ; And now had the marriage been blest by the priest ; The tables they groaned with the weight of the feast, Then first with amazement Fair Imogene found His air was terrific; he uttered no sound He spake not, he moved not, he looked not around- His vizor was closed, and gigantic his height, All pleasure and laughter were hushed at his sight; His presence all bosoms appeared to dismay; At length spake the bride, while she trembled: 'I pray, The lady is silent; the stranger complies— His vizor he slowly unclosed; O God! what a sight met Fair Imogene's eyes! All present then uttered a terrified shout, All turned with disgust from the scene; The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out, And sported his eyes and his temples about, While the spectre addressed Imogene : God grants that, to punish thy falsehood and pride, Thus saying, his arms round the lady he wound, Then sank with his prey through the wide-yawning ground. Or the spectre that bore her away. Not long lived the baron; and none, since that time, For chronicles tell that, by order sublime, At midnight, four times in each year, does her sprite, And shriek as he whirls her around. While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave, Dancing round them the spectres are seen; Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave They howl: To the health of Alonzo the Brave, Lewis's Journal of a West Indian Proprietor and the Life and Correspondence, published in 1839, are the biographical authorities. His Tales of Terror and Wonder are reprinted in Henry Morley's Universal Library. The Monk is not in most libraries. Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824), born in Dublin of Huguenot ancestry, at fifteen entered Trinity College, and became curate first of Loughrea and then of St Peter's, Dublin. He came forward in 1807 as an imitator of the bloodcurdling and nightmarish style of novel-writing, of which Monk' Lewis was the modern master. The style, as Maturin afterwards confessed, was out of date when he was a boy, and he had not power to revive it. The Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio (1807), his first effort, was soon in high favour in the circulating libraries, and seems to have been liked the better because imagination and elaborated diction were carried to the height of extravagance and bombast. To it succeeded The Wild Irish Boy (1808), The Milesian Chief (1812), Women, or Pour et Contre (1818), and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)-all romances in three or four volumes. In Women Maturin aimed at depicting real life and manners, and we have pictures of Calvinistic Methodists, an Irish Meg Merrilies, and an Irish hero, De Courcy, compounded of contradictions and improbabilities. Eva Wentworth and Zaira, a brilliant Italian— who afterwards turns out to be Eva's mother— are drawn with some skill. De Courcy is in love with both, and both are blighted by his inconstancy. Eva, who is purity itself, dies calmly and tranquilly, elevated by religious hope; Zaira meditates suicide, but lives on, as if spell-bound to the death-place of her daughter and lover; and De Courcy very properly perishes of remorse. Maturin's tragedy, Bertram, had a success at Drury Lane in 1816; his next, Manuel and Fredolpho, were both promptly damned. Melmoth is the most hyperbolical of Maturin's romances. hero, a compound of Faust, Mephistopheles, the Wandering Jew, and the Prisoner of Chillon, 'gleams with demon light,' and, owing to a compact with Satan, lives a century and a half, meeting with all manner of preposterous adventures, which might be gruesome were they less tedious and puerile; some of the details are absolutely sickening The and loathsome, and suggest the last convulsive efforts and perversities of the 'Monk' Lewis school of romance. There are two real mysteries about Melmoth-one that it should have fascinated Balzac and Rossetti; the other that in 1892 it should have been deemed worthy of republication, with a memoir, a bibliography, and a 'Note on Maturin,' whom the nameless editors seem to rank above Goethe, Byron, Calderon, Marlowe, and Milton. In 1824-the year of his premature death by accidentally swallowing an embrocation -Maturin published The Albigenses, intended as one of a series of romances illustrative of European feelings and manners in ancient, mediæval, and modern times. Laying the scene of his story in France, in the thirteenth century, the author connected it with the wars between the Catholics and the Albigenses, the latter being the earliest of the reformers of the faith. Such a time was well adapted for the purposes of romance, as has been proved both before and since. Maturin produced lively but fanciful pictures of the Crusaders, and eloquent descriptions of the Albigenses in their lonely worship among rocks and mountains; but he had not the power of portraying or creating living characters, and his attempts at humour were dismal failures. The following, from Melmoth, shows Maturin at his best or worst, according as one takes him : The Victim of the Inquisition. The reptiles, who filled the hole into which I had been thrust, gave me opportunity for a kind of constant, miserable, ridiculous hostility. My mat had been placed in the very seat of warfare;-I shifted it,-still they pursued me;-I placed it against the wall, the cold crawling of their bloated limbs often awoke me from my sleep, and still oftener made me shudder when awake. I struck at them;-I tried to terrify them by my voice, to arm myself against them by the help of my mat; but, above all, my anxiety was ceaseless to defend my head from their loathsome incursions, and my pitcher of water from their dropping into it. I adopted a thousand precautions, trivial as they were inefficacious, but still there was occupation. I do assure you, Sir, I had more to do in my dungeon than in my cell. To be fighting with reptiles in the dark appears the most horrible struggle that can be assigned to man; but what is it compared to his combat with those reptiles which his own heart hourly engenders in a cell, and of which, if his heart be the mother, solitude is the father? I had another employment,-I cannot call it occupation. I had calculated with myself that sixty minutes made an hour, and sixty seconds a minute. I began to think I could keep time as accurately as any clock in a convent, and measure the hours of my confinement or my release. So I sat and counted sixty; a doubt always occurred to me that I was counting them faster than the clock. Then I wished to be the clock, that I might have no feeling, no motive for hurrying on the approach of time. Then I reckoned slower. Sleep sometimes overtook me in this exercise (perhaps I adopted it from that hope); but when I awoke, I applied to it again instantly. Thus I oscillated, reckoned, and measured time on my mat, while time withheld its delicious diary of rising and setting suns, -of the dews of dawn and of twilight,-of the glow of morning and the shades of the evening. When my reckoning was broken by my sleep (and I knew not whether I slept by day or by night), I tried to eke it out by my incessant repetition of minutes and seconds, and I succeeded; for I always consoled myself, that whatever hour it was, sixty minutes must go to an hour. Had I led this life much longer, I might have been converted into the idiot who, as I have read, from the habit of watching a clock, imitated its mechanism so well that when it was dawn, he sounded the hour as faithfully as ear could desire. Such was my life. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) has, as editor of the Family Shakespeare,' been made to furnish the English language with a series of words with unjustly suspicious associations. Born of wealthy parents at Ashley near Bath, he went at sixteen to St Andrews to study medicine, but graduated M.D. of Edinburgh in 1776. After some years of travel in France, Germany, Italy, and Sicily (twice climbing Mount Etna), he settled in London, but did not practise his profession; devoting himself rather to charitable work in connection with prisons, penitentiaries, and Magdalen asylums, he became the continuator of John Howard's good work. He was a friend of Howard's, an intimate of the circle to which Mrs Montagu, Mrs Chapone, and Hannah More belonged, and remembered Dr Johnson vividly. For ten years he lived at St Boniface in the Isle of Wight, and for the last fifteen years of his life at Rhyddings near Swansea. His Letters Written in Holland (1788) give an account of the revolutionary movement of the previous year, and in 1815 he published one or two minor biographical works. But it was in 1818 that he produced 'The Family Shakespeare, in 10 vols. ; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.' The work had a large sale, ran through more than half-a-dozen editions, and was long popular, spite of the ridicule it brought down upon the head of its editor. The last years of Bowdler's life were given to the task of preparing an expurgated edition of Gibbon's History, which was published in six volumes the year after his death, edited by his nephew, and described as being 'for the use of Families and Young Persons, reprinted from the original text, with the careful omissions of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency. And the editor congratulated his uncle on 'the peculiar happiness' of having so purified Shakespeare and Gibbon that they could no longer raise a blush on the cheek of modest innocence, nor plant a pang in the heart of the devout Christian.' It would be unfair to say that he also Bowdlerized the Old Testament; but he prepared for a Sunday-school Society Select Chapters from the Old Testament, with Short Introductions, issued in 1822. The word Bowdlerize, first used apparently in 1836, has become common (usually as Bowdlerise) since about 1870, with a whole train of derivatives -Bowdlerism, Bowdlerization, Bowdlerizer, &c.— and is rarely used save with sovereign contempt for the process, the theory, and the man, even by those who would unhesitatingly refuse to read aloud every and any passage of Shakespeare to boys and girls just old enough to understand and appreciate the jests and allusions Bowdler excised. If the work was to be done, it is doubtful if it could have been done much more judiciously. It is one thing to Bowdlerize for a special purpose; quite another to Bowdlerize by omissions what is meant to be a standard text (as Dr Mitchell for the Scottish Text Society has Bowdlerized in 1897 some of the Gude and Godlie Ballads); and a third thing to substitute as the author's considerable passages which the original writer never wrote or imagined. Bowdler was by no means the first or most prudish preparer of expurgated editions; he was, indeed, considerably less precise than many more recent expurgators of Shakespeare for schools. Castrated editions of the classics are an old-established institution, and the castration of Shakespeare had long been a familiar art. Garrick Bowdlerized him remorselessly, both on the stage and in print; all modern stage-managers carefully cut most of the passages Bowdler excised; and it is something for the typical English Expurgator to have Mr Swinburne's strong support and hearty commendation: 'More nauseous or foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate the merits of Bowdler. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children' (Studies in Prose and Poetry, page 98). Bowdler himself defended his Shakespearean enterprise in a temperately argued pamphlet called A Letter to the British Critic, which he said was occasioned by the censure pronounced in the work on 'Johnson, Pope, Bowdler, Warburton, Theobald, Steevens, Reed, Malone, et Hoc Genus Omne.' It is a really curious fact that, as has been pointed out in Vol. I. p. 433, the name Bowdler was associated with Elizabethan dramatic litera than in China as explorer, map-maker, and administrator; he was sent on missions to reconcile Boers and Kaffirs, and explored many outlying parts of the colony. He had bought a house near Table Mountain, where he meant to settle as a South African country-gentleman, when the Peace of Amiens restored the Cape (temporarily) to the Dutch (1802), and Barrow came home to serve his country for forty years as secretary to the Admiralty under fourteen administrations. His zeal in promoting Arctic exploration is indicated by the way his name figures on the map of the Arctic regions. Barrow Straits, Cape Barrow, &c. He was all his life an indefatigable worker and an inexhaustible writer. Among his publications are to be counted some two hundred articles in the Quarterly Review and a series in the Encyclopædia Britannica; Lives of Lord Macartney, Lord Howe, and Peter the Great ; accounts of his travels in China and in South Africa-long standard works; books on voyages to Cochin-China and the Arctic regions; and a very interesting Autobiography (1847). There is also a Memoir of him by Staunton (1852). Robert Plumer Ward (1765-1846) was born in London and bred at Oxford, went to the Bar, and was successively a judge, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a lord of admiralty, and auditor of the civil list. He wrote a history of the law of nations, several books on the law of belligerents, contraband, and the like, and in 1825 he published anonymously a discursively metaphysical and religious romance, Tremaine, or the Man of Refinement. As the author alluded to his intimacy with English statesmen and political events, and seemed to belong to the Evangelical party in the Church, much speculation took place as to the authorship of the novel. The prolixity of some of the dissertations and dialogues, where the story stood still for half a volume that the parties might converse and dispute, rendered Tremaine heavy and tedious, in spite of some originality. But it was, as Blackwood thought, 'extravagantly overrated,' and ran through four editions in one year. In De Vere, or the Man of Independence (1827), the public dwelt with keen. interest on a portraiture of Mr Canning, whose career was then about to close in his premature death; and this desultory roman à clef used to be cited as a kind of authority on Canning's views and manner of speech, the Wentworth of the story being a close study of the statesman. Clifford, or the Constant Man (1841), is also a tale of actual life; its hero is secretary to a Cabinet Minister, and the author revels in official details, social rivalries, and political intrigue. Canning sarcastically said that Ward's law-books were as pleasant as novels, and his novels as dull as lawbooks. Now it but rarely happens that a volume either of the one set or the other is disturbed out of its dust-covered repose in old libraries. De |