Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning, Irish hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and Donna Isidoras—­all exposed to each other in violent and glaring contrast and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language."[65]

This breathless sentence gives some conception of the delirious imagery of Maturin’s romance, but the book is worthy of a more respectful, unhurried survey. Melmoth shows a distinct advance on Montorio in constructive power.  Each separate story is perfectly clear and easy to follow, in spite of the elaborate interlacing.  The romance opens with the death of a miser in a desolate Irish farmstead, with harpies clustering at his bedside.  His nephew and heir, John Melmoth, is adjured to destroy a certain manuscript and a portrait of an ancestor with eyes “such as one feels they wish they had never seen and feels they can never forget.”  Alone at midnight, John Melmoth reads the manuscript, which is reputed to have been written by Stanton, an English traveller in Spain, about 1676.  The document relates a startling story of a mysterious Englishman who appears at a Spanish wedding with disastrous consequences, and reappears before Stanton in a madhouse offering release on dreadful conditions.  After reading it, John Melmoth decides to burn the family portrait.  He is visited by a sinister form, who proves that he is no figment of the imagination by leaving black and blue marks on his relative’s wrist.  The next night a ship is wrecked in a storm.  The Wanderer appears, and mocks the victims with fiendish mirth.  The sole survivor, Don Alonzo Moncada, unfolds his story to John Melmoth.  The son of a great duke, he has been forced to become a monk to save his mother’s honour.  He dwells with the excruciating detail in which Maturin is inclined to revel, on the horrors of Spanish monasteries.  Escaping through a subterranean passage, he is guided by a parricide, who incidentally tells him a loathsome story of two immured lovers.  His plan of flight is foiled, and he is borne off to the dungeons of the Inquisition.  Here the Wanderer, who has a miraculous power to enter where he will, offers, on the ineffable condition, to procure his freedom.  Moncada repudiates the temptation, effects his own escape during a great fire, and catches sight of the stranger on the summit of a burning building.  He takes refuge with a Jew, but, to evade the vigilance of the Inquisitors, disappears suddenly down an underground passage, where he finds Adonijah, another Jew, who obligingly employs him as an amanuensis, and sets him to copy a manuscript.  This gives Maturin the opportunity, for which he has been waiting, to introduce his “Tale of the Indian.”  The story of Immalee, who is visited on her desert island by the Wanderer in the guise of a lover as well as a tempter, forms the most memorable part of Melmoth.