The devil doesn't keep to his agreement to release him, however, for Lewis tells us that taking his victim to the top of a mountain and "darting his talons into the monk's shaven crown, he sprang with him from the rock. The caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio's shrieks. The demon continued to soar aloft till, reaching a dreadful height, he released the sufferer. Headlong fell the monk." He plunges to the river's brink, after which a storm is evoked by the devil and his body swept away in the flood. A similar dæmonic manifestation occurs in _Zofloya_. Victoria has been induced to bind herself to the Evil One, who has appeared as a Moorish servant of impressive personality and special powers. He grants her wishes hostile to her enemies, holding many conferences with her in the dark forest where he is heralded by flute-like sounds. He appears sometimes like a flame, sometimes like a lightning flash. He comes with the swiftness of the wind and tells her that her thoughts summoned him. At last, he announces himself as Satan, and assumes his own hideous form of gigantism. Behold me as I am, no longer that which I appeared to be, but the sworn enemy of all created nature, by men called Satan. Yes, it was I that under semblance of the Moor appeared to thee. As he spoke, he grasped more firmly the neck of Victoria, with one push he whirled her headlong down the dreadful abyss!--as she fell his loud dæmonic laugh, his yells of triumph echoed in her ears; and a mangled corpse she fell, she was received into the foaming waters below. The devil is seen in _Vathek_ as a preternaturally ugly old man with strange powers. James Hogg has rather a penchant for the demon, for he uses him in The _Wool-Gatherer_, and in _Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, which is a story of religious superstition, of the use of diablerie and witchcraft, introducing a satanic tempter. On the whole, the appearances of the devil in Gothic fiction lack impressiveness, are weak in psychologic subtlety, and have not the force either of the epic or of the dramatic representations. Nor have they the human appeal that the incarnations of the devil in later fiction make to our sympathies.