To complete this phantasmagoric
exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers,
parricides, maniacs in abundance, monks with scourges
pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood;
subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their
wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning, Irish
hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna
Claras and Donna Isidoras--all exposed to each other in
violent and glaring contrast and all their adventures
narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid,
vehement, and painfully elaborated language."[65]
This breathless sentence gives some conception of the delirious
imagery of Maturin's romance, but the book is worthy of a more
respectful, unhurried survey. _Melmoth_ shows a distinct advance
on _Montorio_ in constructive power. Each separate story is
perfectly clear and easy to follow, in spite of the elaborate
interlacing. The romance opens with the death of a miser in a
desolate Irish farmstead, with harpies clustering at his bedside.
His nephew and heir, John Melmoth, is adjured to destroy a
certain manuscript and a portrait of an ancestor with eyes "such
as one feels they wish they had never seen and feels they can
never forget." Alone at midnight, John Melmoth reads the
manuscript, which is reputed to have been written by Stanton, an
English traveller in Spain, about 1676.
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