succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than "The Monk." His drama, "The Castle Spectre," was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fiction in ballad form--"Tales of Terror," (1799) "Tales of Wonder," (1801) and a succession of translations from Germany. Gothic romances, both English and German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire "Northanger Abbey" was by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk far toward absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its final subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person of Charles Robert Maturin, (1782-1824) an obscure and eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused Radcliffian imitation called "The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio," (1807) Maturin at length evolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of "Melmoth, the Wanderer," (1820) in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before. "Melmoth" is the tale of an Irish gentleman who, in the seventeenth century, obtained a preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his soul. If he can persuade another to take the bargain off his hands, and assume his existing state, he can be saved; but this he can never manage to effect, no matter how assiduously he haunts those whom despair has made reckless and frantic. The framework of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length, digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and laboured dovetailing and coincidences; but at various points in the endless rambling, there is felt a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind--a kinship to the essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer's part, which makes the book a true document of aesthetic self-expression rather than a mere clever compound of artifice. No unbiased reader can doubt that with "Melmoth" an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror-tale is represented. Fear is taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over mankind's very destiny. Maturin's shudders, the work of one capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are fair game for the parodist, but it would be difficult to find a false note in the feverishly intensified action and high atmospheric tension of the Irishman whose less sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the finest possible natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt, Maturin is a man of authentic genius, and he was so recognized by Balzac, who grouped "Melmoth" with Moliere's "Don Juan,"