Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/202

 



Talking of romances, he said:

The Monk’ is perhaps one of the best in any language, not excepting the German. It only wanted one thing, as I told Lewis, to have rendered it perfect. He should have made the dæmon really in love with Ambrosio: this would have given it a human interest. ‘The Monk’ was written when Lewis was only twenty, and he seems to have exhausted all his genius on it. Perhaps at that age he was in earnest in his belief of magic wonders. That is the secret of Walter Scott’s inspiration: he retains and encourages all the superstitions of his youth. Lewis caught his passion for the marvellous, and it amounted to a mania with him, in Germany; but the groundwork of ‘The Monk,’ is neither original nor German: it is derived from the tale of ‘Santon Barsisa.’ The episode of ‘The Bleeding Nun,’ which was turned into a melo-drama, is from the German. 