“It is inconceivable to me how this person forces himself on my company, harasses me with tales that have no more application to me than the legend of the Cid, and may be as apocryphal as the ballad of Roncesvalles—­”

but yet the stranger has not finished.  He proceeds to tell him a tale in which he will feel a peculiar interest, that of Isidora, his own daughter, and finally urges him to hasten to her rescue.  Don Francisco wanders by easy stages to Madrid, and, on his arrival, marries Isidora against her will to Montilla.  Melmoth, according to promise, appears at the wedding.  The bridegroom is slain.  Isidora, with Melmoth’s child, ends her days in the dungeons of the Inquisition, murmuring:  “Paradise! will he be there?” So far as one may judge from the close of the story, it seems not.

Moncada and John Melmoth, whom we left, at the beginning of the romance, in Ireland, are revisited by the Wanderer, whose time on earth has at last run out.  He confesses his failure:  “I have traversed the world in the search, and no one to gain that world, would lose his own soul.”  His words remind us of the text of the sermon which suggested to Maturin the idea of the romance.  Like the companions of Dr. Faustus, Melmoth and Moncada hear terrible sounds from the room of the Wanderer in the last throes of agony.  The next morning the room is empty; but, following a track to the sea-cliffs, they see, on a crag beneath, the kerchief the Wanderer had worn about his neck.  “Melmoth and Moncada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home.”

This extraordinary romance, like Montorio, clearly owes much to the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, and “Monk” Lewis.  Immalee, as her name implies, is but a glorified Emily with a loxia on her shoulder instead of a lute in her hand.  The monastic horrors are obviously a heritage from The Monk.  The Rosicrucian legend, as handled in St. Leon, may have offered hints to Maturin, whose treatment is, however, far more imaginative and impressive than that of Godwin.  The resemblance to the legend of the Wandering Jew need not be laboured.  Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and the first part of Goethe’s Faust left their impression on the story.  The closing scenes inevitably remind us of the last act of Marlowe’s tragedy.  But, when all these debts are acknowledged they do but serve to enhance the success of Maturin, who out of these varied strands could weave so original a romance. Melmoth is not an ingenious patchwork of previous stories.  It is the outpouring of a morbid imagination that has long brooded on the fearful and the terrific.  Imbued with the grandeur and solemnity of his theme, Maturin endeavours to write in dignified, stately language.  There are frequent lapses into bombast, but occasionally his rhetoric is splendidly effective: