lity of guilt that makes
cowards
of us all."

Maturin is distinguished from the incompetent horde of
romance-writers, whom Scott condemned, by the powerful eloquence
of his style and by his ability to analyse emotion, to write as
if he himself were swayed by the feeling he describes. His insane
extravagances have at least the virtue that they come flaming hot
from an excited imagination. The passage quoted by
Scott--Orazio's attempt to depict his state of mind after he had
heard of his brother's perfidy--may serve to illustrate the force
and vigour of his language:

"Oh! that midnight darkness of the soul in which it
seeks for something whose loss has carried away every
sense but one of utter and desolate deprivation; in
which it traverses leagues in motion and worlds in
thought without consciousness of relief, yet with a
dread of pausing. I had nothing to seek, nothing to
recover; the whole world could not restore me an atom,
could not show me again a glimpse of what I had been or
lost, yet I rushed on as if the next step would reach
shelter and peace."

_Melmoth the Wanderer_ has found many admirers. It fascinated
Rossetti,[60] Thackeray[61] and Miss Mitford.[62] It was praised
by Balzac, who wrote a satirical sequel--_Melmoth Reconcilie a
L'Eglise_ (1835), and by Baudelaire, and exercised a considerable
influence on French literature.[63] It consists of a series of
tales, strung together in a complicated fashion. In each tale the
Wanderer, who has bartered his soul in return for prolonged life,
may, if he can, persuade someone to take the bargain off his
hands.[64] He visits those who are plunged in despair. His
approach is heralded by strange music, and his eyes have a
preternatural lustre that terrifies his victims. No one will
agree to his "incommunicable condition."

The bird's-eye view of an Edinburgh Reviewer who described
_Melmoth_ as "the sacrifice of Genius in the Temple of False
Taste," will give some idea of the bewildering variety of its
contents:

"His hero is a modern Faustus, who has bartered his
soul with the powers of darkness for protracted life
and unlimited worldly enjoyment; his heroine, a species
of insular goddess, a virgin Calypso of the Indian
Ocean, who, amid flowers and foliage, lives upon figs
and tamarinds, associates with peacocks and monkeys, is
worshipped by the occasional visitants of he