“—­Loathes the sun or blazing taper’s light:  The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp, Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers, Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours.”

The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the “Otranto” type, who is planning an incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus soliloquizes:  “What though she prefer a basilisk’s kiss to mine?  Because my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly?  That will I not, by Heaven!  Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald’s bleeding ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear ’Hold!  Hold!’—­Peace, stormy heart, she comes.”  Reginald’s ghost does not flit, because Reginald is still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh.  He is Osmond’s brother and Angela’s father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had murdered him.  It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, he had recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbeknown in solitary confinement, in a dungeon vault under the castle, for the somewhat long period of sixteen years.  He is discovered in Act V., “emaciated, in coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain bound round his body.”

Reginald’s ghost does not flit, but Evelina’s does.  Evelina is Reginald’s murdered wife, and her specter in “white and flowing garments, spotted with blood,” appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique bedstead and the portrait of a lady on a sliding panel.  In truth, the castle is uncommonly well supplied with apparitions.  Earl Herbert rides around it every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great hall, playing football with his own head.  So says Motley the jester, who affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the “Otranto” pattern.

A few poems were scattered through the pages of “The Monk,” including a ballad from the Danish, and another from the Spanish.  But the most famous of these was “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene,” original with Lewis, though evidently suggested by “Lenore.”  It tells how a lover who had gone to Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the lights burned blue.  At the request of the company, the strange knight raises his visor and discloses a skeleton head: 

    “All present then uttered a terrified shout;
      All turned with disgust from the scene;
    The worms they crept in and the worms they crept out,
    And sported his eyes and his temples about
      While the spectre addressed Imogene.”