The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as--"Coleridge has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious little tale _La Fanfarlo,_ he preferred artifice to nature, especially when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have about the personality of Maturin--gossip which brings out clearly the deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader as if he were admiring himself before his mirror. The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic and melodramatic talent. _Melmoth the Wanderer_ is in parts very thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque and terrible--Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam--have known how to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are told--all in parenthesis--and the greater part of the book is contained .within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and it has none of the supremacy in that line of the _Contes Drolatiques_ of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons of the Inquisition--an attempted escape, a scene where an immured wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness--are full of a certain kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas, with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer narrative of Casanova--the unsurpassed model of all such narratives in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple statement--a record of external events from which one realizes, as one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of the persons who were undergoing such experiences--Maturin seeks his effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion. _Melmoth the Wanderer_ is only the object of our historical curiosity. We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance." III I