He replies in a free paraphrase of Hamlet: 

  “It is this cursed domestic sensibility of guilt that makes
cowards
  of us all.”

Maturin is distinguished from the incompetent horde of romance-writers, whom Scott condemned, by the powerful eloquence of his style and by his ability to analyse emotion, to write as if he himself were swayed by the feeling he describes.  His insane extravagances have at least the virtue that they come flaming hot from an excited imagination.  The passage quoted by Scott—­Orazio’s attempt to depict his state of mind after he had heard of his brother’s perfidy—­may serve to illustrate the force and vigour of his language: 

“Oh! that midnight darkness of the soul in which it seeks for something whose loss has carried away every sense but one of utter and desolate deprivation; in which it traverses leagues in motion and worlds in thought without consciousness of relief, yet with a dread of pausing.  I had nothing to seek, nothing to recover; the whole world could not restore me an atom, could not show me again a glimpse of what I had been or lost, yet I rushed on as if the next step would reach shelter and peace.”

Melmoth the Wanderer has found many admirers.  It fascinated Rossetti,[60] Thackeray[61] and Miss Mitford.[62] It was praised by Balzac, who wrote a satirical sequel—­Melmoth Reconcilie a L’Eglise (1835), and by Baudelaire, and exercised a considerable influence on French literature.[63] It consists of a series of tales, strung together in a complicated fashion.  In each tale the Wanderer, who has bartered his soul in return for prolonged life, may, if he can, persuade someone to take the bargain off his hands.[64] He visits those who are plunged in despair.  His approach is heralded by strange music, and his eyes have a preternatural lustre that terrifies his victims.  No one will agree to his “incommunicable condition.”

The bird’s-eye view of an Edinburgh Reviewer who described Melmoth as “the sacrifice of Genius in the Temple of False Taste,” will give some idea of the bewildering variety of its contents: 

“His hero is a modern Faustus, who has bartered his soul with the powers of darkness for protracted life and unlimited worldly enjoyment; his heroine, a species of insular goddess, a virgin Calypso of the Indian Ocean, who, amid flowers and foliage, lives upon figs and tamarinds, associates with peacocks and monkeys, is worshipped by the occasional visitants of her island, finds her way into Spain where she is married to the aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost of a murdered domestic being the witness of her nuptials; and finally dies in a dungeon of the Inquisition at Madrid.  To complete this phantasmagoric exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers, parricides, maniacs in abundance, monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean