“Every muscle in his gigantic form seemed convulsed by some horrible sensation; the deepest gloom darkened every feature; the wind from the unclosed window agitated his raven locks, and every hair appeared to writhe itself.  His eyeballs glared, his teeth chattered, his lips trembled; and yet a smile of satisfied vengeance played horribly around them.  His complexion seemed suddenly to be changed to the dark tincture of an African; the expression of his countenance was dreadful, was diabolical.  Magdalena, as she gazed upon his face, thought that she gazed upon a demon.”

Here, to quote the Lady Hysterica Belamour, we have surely the “horrid, horrible, horridest horror.”  But in Koenigsmark the Robber, or The Terror of Bohemia (1818), Lewis’s caste includes an enormous yellow-eyed spider, a wolf who changes into a peasant and disappears amid a cloud of sulphur, and a ghost who sheds three ominous drops of boiling blood.  It was probably such stories as this that Peacock had in mind when he declared, through Mr. Flosky, that the devil had become “too base and popular” for the surfeited appetite of readers of fiction.  Yet, as Carlyle once exclaimed of the German terror-drama, as exemplified in Kotzebue, Grillparzer and Klingemann, whose stock-in-trade is similar to that of Lewis:  “If any man wish to amuse himself irrationally, here is the ware for his money."[51] Byron, who had himself attempted in Oscar and Alva (Hours of Idleness, 1807) a ballad in the manner of Lewis, describes with irony the triumphs of terror: 

  “Oh! wonderworking Lewis!  Monk or Bard,
  Who fain would make Parnassus a churchyard! 
  Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow,
  Thy muse a sprite, Apollo’s sexton thou;
  Whether on ancient tombs thou tak’st thy stand,
  By gibbering spectres hailed, thy kindred band;
  Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page
  To please the females of our modest age;
  All hail, M.P., from whose infernal brain
  Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train;
  At whose command ‘grim women’ throng in crowds
  And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds
  With small grey men—­wild yagers and what not,
  To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott;
  Again, all hail! if tales like thine may please,
  St. Luke alone can vanquish the disease. 
  Even Satan’s self with thee might dread to dwell,
  And in thy skull discern a deeper hell!"[52]

Scott’s delightfully discursive review of The Fatal Revenge or The Family of Montorio (1810), not only forms a fitting introduction to the romances of Maturin, but presents a lively sketch of the fashionable reading of the day.  It has been insinuated that the Quarterly Review was too heavy and serious, that it contained, to quote Scott’s own words, “none of those light and airy articles which a young lady might read while her hair was papering.”  To redeem the reputation of the journal, Scott gallantly