SOURCE: "Matthew Gregory Lewis," in The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, 1938. Reprint, Russell and Russell, Inc., 1964, pp. 202-308.

In the following excerpt, Summers details the composition, contemporary critical reception, plot, style, sources, translations, adaptations, and literary influence of The Monk. Only those footnotes pertaining to the excerpt below have been reprinted.

Coleridge on Lewis's the Monk:

The sufferings which [Lewis] describes are so frightful and intolerable, that we break with abruptness from the delusion, and indignantly suspect the man of a species of brutality, who could find a pleasure in wantonly imagining them; and the abominations which he pourtrays with no hurrying pencil, are such as the observation of character by no means demanded, such as 'no observation of character can justify, because no good man would willingly suffer them to pass, however transiently, through his own mind.' The merit of a novellisi is...