Those who find Mrs.
Radcliffe's unruffled pace leisurely beyond endurance, or who
dislike her coldly reasonable methods of accounting for what is
only apparently supernatural, or who sometimes feel stifled by
the oppressive air of gentility that broods over her romantic
world, will find ample reparation in the melodramatic pages of
"Monk" Lewis. Here, indeed, may those who will and dare sup full
with horrors. Lewis, in reckless abandonment, throws to the winds
all restraint, both moral and artistic, that had bound his
predecessor. The incidents, which follow one another in
kaleidoscopic variety, are like the disjointed phases of a
delirium or nightmare, from which there is no escape. We are
conscious that his story is unreal or even ludicrous, yet Lewis
has a certain dogged power of driving us unrelentingly through
it, regardless of our own will. Literary historians have tended
to over-emphasise the connection between Mrs. Radcliffe and
Lewis. Their purposes and achievement are so different that it is
hardly accurate to speak of them as belonging to the same school.
It is true that in one of his letters Lewis asserts that he was
induced to go on with his romance, _The Monk_, by reading _The
Mysteries of Udolpho_, "one of the most interesting books that
has (sic) ever been written," and that he was struck by the
resemblance of his own character to that of Montoni;[40] but his
literary debt to Mrs.
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