plays a less prominent part in The Italian than in the previous novels, and Mrs. Radcliffe relies for her effect rather on sheer terror.  The dramatic scene where Schedoni stealthily approaches the sleeping Ellena at midnight recalls the more highly coloured, but less impressive scene in Antonia’s bedchamber.  The fate of Bianchi, Ellena’s aunt, is strangely reminiscent of that of Elvira, Antonia’s mother.  The convent scenes and the overbearing abbess had been introduced into Mrs. Radcliffe’s earlier novels; but in The Italian, the anti-Roman feeling is more strongly emphasised than usual.  This may or may not have been due to the influence of Lewis.  There is no direct evidence that Mrs. Radcliffe had read The Monk, but the book was so notorious that a fellow novelist would be almost certain to explore its pages.  Hoffmann’s romance, Elixir des Teufels (1816), is manifestly written under its inspiration.  Coincidence could not account for the remarkable resemblances to incidents in the story of Ambrosio.

The far-famed collection of Tales of Terror appeared in 1799, The Tales of Wonder in 1801.  The rest of Lewis’s work consists mainly of translations and adaptations from the German.  He revelled in the horrific school of melodrama.  He delighted in the kind of German romance parodied by Meredith in Farina, where Aunt Lisbeth tells Margarita of spectres, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight, who “uttered noises that wintered the blood and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and kept it stiff.” The Bravo of Venice (1805) is a translation of Zschokke’s Abellino, der Grosse Bandit, but Lewis invented a superfluous character, Monaldeschi, Rosabella’s destined bridegroom, apparently with the object that Abellino might slay him early in the story—­and added a concluding chapter.  At the outset of the story, Rosalvo, a man after Lewis’s own heart, declares: 

“To astonish is my destiny:  Rosalvo knows no medium:  Rosalvo can never act like common men,” and thereupon proceeds to prove by his extraordinary actions that this is no idle vaunt.  He lives a double life:  in the guise of Abellino, he joins the banditti, and by inexplicable methods rids Venice of her enemies; in the guise of a noble Florentine, Flodoardo, he woos the Doge’s daughter, Rosabella.  The climax of the story is reached when Flodoardo, under oath to deliver up the bandit Abellino, appears before the Doge at the appointed hour and reveals his double identity.  He is hailed as the saviour of Hungary, and wins Rosabella as his bride.  In the second edition of The Bravo of Venice, a romance in four volumes by M. G. Lewis, Legends of the Nunnery, is announced as in the press.  There seems to be no record of it elsewhere. Feudal Tyrants (1806), a long romance from the German, connected with the story of William Tell, consists of a series of memoirs loosely strung together, in which the most alarming episode is the apparition of the pale spectre of an aged monk.  In Blanche and Osbright, or Mistrust (1808),[50] which is not avowedly a translation, Lewis depicts an even more revolting portrait than that of Abellino in his bravo’s disguise.  He adds detail after detail without considering the final effect on the eye: