A passage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the incarcerated nun, will illustrate Lewis’ wonder-working arts:  “A faint glimmering of light which strained through the bars permitted me to distinguish the surrounding horrors.  I was oppressed by a noisome, suffocating smell; and perceiving that the grated door was unfastened, I thought that I might possibly effect my escape.  As I raised myself with this design, my hand rested upon something soft.  I grasped it and advanced it toward the light.  Almighty God! what was my disgust! my consternation!  In spite of its putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I perceived a corrupted human head, and recognized the features of a nun who had died some months before. . .  A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof by an iron chain and shed a gloomy light through the dungeon.  Emblems of death were seen on every side; skills, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. . .  As I shrunk from the cutting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . .  Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair.  Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant.”

“The Monk” won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, assisted no doubt by the outcry against its immorality.  Lewis tried to defend himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed from “The History of Santon Barsisa” in the Guardian (No. 148).  But the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions.  Lewis’ melodrama “The Castle Specter” was first performed December 14, 1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and “continued popular as an acting play,” says the biographer, “up to a very recent period."[36] This is strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play is a trumpery affair.  Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene.  “It had been said,” explains Lewis in his preface, “that if Mr. Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts.”  The prologue, spoken by Mr. Wroughton, invokes “the fair enchantress, Romance”: 

    “The moonstruck child of genius and of woe,”

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