e 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.

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 c