the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood, there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room.  “In maturer years,” says his biographer, “Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the ghastly machinery of his works.”

Lewis’ first and most celebrated publication was “Ambrosio, or the Monk” (1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe.  He began it at Oxford in 1792, describing it in a letter to his mother as “a romance in the style of ‘The Castle of Otranto.’” But in the summer of the same year he went to Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the Sturm- und Drangperiode.  For years Lewis was one of the most active intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the English literary market.  He fed the stage with melodramas and operas, and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35] Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and finished his “Monk,” in ten weeks.  “I was induced to go on with it,” he wrote to his mother, “by reading the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,’ which is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been published. . .  When you read it, tell me whether you think there is any resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own.  I confess that it struck me.”  This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness between Anne Radcliffe’s dark-browed villain and his own cherubic personality recalls Scott’s story about the picture of Lewis, by Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House.  “The artist had ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with all this, the features were preserved and ennobled.  It passed from hand to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, ’Like Mat Lewis!  Why, that picture’s like a man.’” “The Monk” used, and abused, the now familiar apparatus of Gothic romance.  It had Spanish grandees, heroines of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted chambers, wainscoated in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock tolled one,