Lewis, MATTHEW GREGORY

Lewis, MATTHEW GREGORY ('Monk Lewis'), was born in London, 9th July 1775, and educated at Westminster, at Christ Church College, Oxford, and at Weimar, where he was introduced to Goethe. In 1794 he went as an attaché to the Hague, and there, inspired by Glanvill (his mother's favourite author) and the Mysteries of Udolpho, wrote at nineteen Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795), the gruesome, unclean romance which made him so famous that in 1798 his invitation to dine at an Edinburgh hotel could elate Scott as nothing before or afterwards. A musical drama, The Castle Spectre (1796), The Bravo of Venice (1804), and a host more of blood-and-thunder plays, novels, and tales are happily forgotten; but two lines at least survive of one of his ballads, Alonso the Brave. In 1796 he entered parliament as a silent member, and in 1812 he inherited from his father two large estates in Jamaica. So to better the condition of his slaves there, good-hearted, lachrymose, clever little 'Mat' forsook the society of the Prince Regent, Byron, and all his other great friends, and made the two voyages, in 1815 and 1817, which furnished materials for his one really valuable work, the posthumous Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834). On his way home, in the Gulf of Florida, he died of yellow fever, 13th May 1818, and was buried at sea. See his Life and Correspondence (2 vols. 1839).