Lewis’s attempts to depict passion or describe character.  Bold, flaunting splashes of colour, strongly marked, passionate faces, exaggerated gestures start from every page, and his style is as extravagant as his imagery.  Sometimes he uses a short, staccato sentence to enforce his point, but more often we are engulfed in a swirling welter of words.  He delights in the declamatory language of the stage, and all his characters speak as if they were behind the footlights, shouting to the gallery.

A cold-blooded reviewer, in whom the detective instinct was strong, indicated the sources of The Monk so mercilessly, that Lewis appears in his critique[46] rather as the perpetrator of a series of ingenious thefts than as the creator of a novel: 

“The outline of the Monk Ambrosio’s story was suggested by that of the Santon Barissa [Barsisa] in the Guardian:[47] the form of temptation is borrowed from The Devil in Love of Canzotte [Cazotte], and the catastrophe is taken from The Sorcerer.  The adventures of Raymond and Agnes are less obviously imitations, yet the forest scene near Strasburg brings to mind an incident in Smollett’s Count Fathom; the bleeding nun is described by the author as a popular tale of the Germans,[48] and the convent prison resembles the inflictions of Mrs. Radcliffe.”

The industrious reviewer overlooks the legend of the Wandering Jew, which might have been added to the list of Lewis’s “borrowings.”  It must be admitted that Lewis transforms, or at least remodels, what he borrows.  Addison’s story relates how a sage of reputed sanctity seduces and slays a maiden brought to him for cure, and later sells his soul.  Lewis abandons the Oriental setting, converts the santon into a monk and embroiders the story according to his fancy.  Scott alludes to a Scottish version of what is evidently a widespread legend.[49] The resemblance of the catastrophe—­presumably the appearance of Satan in the form of Lucifer—­to the scene in Mickle’s Sorcerer, which was published among Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801), is vague enough to be accidental.  There are blue flames and sorcery, and an apparition in both, but that is all the two scenes have in common.  The tyrannical abbess may be a heritage from The Romance of the Forest, but, if so she is exaggerated almost beyond recognition.

In fashioning as the villain of her latest novel, The Italian, a monk, whose birth is wrapt in obscurity, Mrs. Radcliffe may have been influenced by Lewis’s Monk which had appeared two years before.  Both Schedoni and Ambrosio are reputed saints, both are plunged into the blackest guilt, and both are victims of the Inquisition.  Mrs. Radcliffe, it is true, recoils from introducing the enemy of mankind, but, before the secrets are finally revealed, we almost suspect Schedoni of having dabbled in the Black Arts, and his actual crime falls short of our expectations.  The “explained supernatural”