are paltry and incredible. The bleeding figures that
wrought so painfully on the sensitive nerves of Ippolito are
merely waxen images that spout blood automatically.
Disappearances and reappearances, which seemed supernatural, are
simply effected by private exits and entrances. Other startling
phenomena are accounted for in the same trivial fashion.

Maturin seems to have crowded into his story nearly every
character and incident that had been employed in earlier Gothic
romances. Schemoli is a remarkably faithful portrait of Mrs.
Radcliffe's Schedoni. From beneath his cowl flash the piercing
eyes, whose very glance will daunt the bravest heart; his sallow
visage is furrowed with the traces of bygone passions; he shuns
society, and is dreaded by his associates. The oppressed maiden,
driven into a nunnery, drugged and immured, the ambitious
countess, the devoted, loquacious servant, the inhuman
abbess--all play their accustomed parts. The background shifts
from the robber's den to the ruined chapel, from the castle vault
to the dungeon of the Inquisition, each scene being admirably
suited to the situation contrived, or the emotion displayed.
Maturin had accurately inspected the passages and trap-doors of
Otranto. No item, not a rusty lock, not a creaking hinge, had
escaped his vigilant eye. He knew intimately every nook and
cranny of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic abbeys. He had viewed with
trepidation their blood-stained floors, their skeletons and
corpses, and had carefully calculated the psychological effect of
these properties. He had gazed with starting eye on the lurid
horrors of "Monk" Lewis, and had carried away impressions so
distinct that he, perhaps unwittingly, transferred them to the
pages of his own story. But Maturin's reading was not strictly
confined to the school of terror. He had studied Shakespeare's
tragedies, and these may have suggested to him the idea of
enhancing the interest of his story by dissecting human motive
and describing passionate feeling. In depicting the remorse of
the count and his wife Zenobia, who had committed a murder to
gratify their ambition, and who are tormented by ugly dreams,
Maturin inevitably draws from _Macbeth_. Zenobia, the stronger
character, reviles her husband for indulging in sickly fancies
and strives to embolden him:

"Like a child you run from a mask you have yourself painted."

He replies in a free paraphrase of _Hamlet_:

"It is this cursed domestic sensibi