the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand.  There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions; beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the loathsome relics of the dead.

With all this, “The Monk” is a not wholly contemptible work.  There is a certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of “The Castle of Otranto.”  And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which distinguishes that very prolix narrator.  There is nothing strictly mediaeval about it.  The knight in armor cuts no figure and the historical period is not precisely indicated.  But the ecclesiastical features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher of the convent, of the scene in “Marmion” where Constance is immured in the vaults of Lindisfarne—­a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott’s part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of Flodden.  The motto from Horace on the title page of “The Monk” sums up its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author’s writings, prose and verse—­

    “Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
    Nocturnos lemures portentaque.”

The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis’ Capuchin monastery in Madrid; a man of rigid austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads him by degrees through a series of crimes, including incest and parricide, until he finally sells his soul to the devil to escape from the dungeons of the Inquisition and the auto da fe, subscribing the agreement, in approved fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron pen dipped in blood from his own veins.  The fiend, who enters with thunder and lightning, over whose shoulders “waved two enormous sable wings,” and whose hair “was supplied by living snakes,” then snatches up his victim and soars with him to a peak of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa landscape of torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by the light of an opera moon, and to the sound of the night wind sighing hoarsely and “the shrill cry of mountain eagles,” he drops him over a precipice and makes an end of him.