“Why should I be shut up in this house of horrors to deal with spirits and damned things and the secrets of the infernal world while there are so many paths open to pleasure, the varieties of human intercourse and the enjoyment of life?”

Maturin, a disciple of Mrs. Radcliffe, feels it his duty to explain away the apparently miraculous incidents in his story, but he lacks the persevering ingenuity that partly compensates for her frauds.  On a single page he calmly discloses secrets which have harassed us for four volumes, and his long-deferred explanations are paltry and incredible.  The bleeding figures that wrought so painfully on the sensitive nerves of Ippolito are merely waxen images that spout blood automatically.  Disappearances and reappearances, which seemed supernatural, are simply effected by private exits and entrances.  Other startling phenomena are accounted for in the same trivial fashion.

Maturin seems to have crowded into his story nearly every character and incident that had been employed in earlier Gothic romances.  Schemoli is a remarkably faithful portrait of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Schedoni.  From beneath his cowl flash the piercing eyes, whose very glance will daunt the bravest heart; his sallow visage is furrowed with the traces of bygone passions; he shuns society, and is dreaded by his associates.  The oppressed maiden, driven into a nunnery, drugged and immured, the ambitious countess, the devoted, loquacious servant, the inhuman abbess—­all play their accustomed parts.  The background shifts from the robber’s den to the ruined chapel, from the castle vault to the dungeon of the Inquisition, each scene being admirably suited to the situation contrived, or the emotion displayed.  Maturin had accurately inspected the passages and trap-doors of Otranto.  No item, not a rusty lock, not a creaking hinge, had escaped his vigilant eye.  He knew intimately every nook and cranny of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Gothic abbeys.  He had viewed with trepidation their blood-stained floors, their skeletons and corpses, and had carefully calculated the psychological effect of these properties.  He had gazed with starting eye on the lurid horrors of “Monk” Lewis, and had carried away impressions so distinct that he, perhaps unwittingly, transferred them to the pages of his own story.  But Maturin’s reading was not strictly confined to the school of terror.  He had studied Shakespeare’s tragedies, and these may have suggested to him the idea of enhancing the interest of his story by dissecting human motive and describing passionate feeling.  In depicting the remorse of the count and his wife Zenobia, who had committed a murder to gratify their ambition, and who are tormented by ugly dreams, Maturin inevitably draws from Macbeth.  Zenobia, the stronger character, reviles her husband for indulging in sickly fancies and strives to embolden him: 

  “Like a child you run from a mask you have yourself painted.”