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Matthew Gregory Leho professed to have translated this romance

out of the German, very much, I believe, as Horace Walpole professed

to have taken The Castle of Otranto from an old Italian manuscript,

was born in 1775 of a wealthy family His father had an estate in

India and a post in a Governhter to

Sir Thoe III

She was a young mother; her son Mattheas devoted to her from the

first As a child he called her "Fanny," and as a man held firmly

by her when she was deserted by her husband From Westminster

School, M G Lewis passed to Christ Church, Oxford Already he was

busy over tales and plays, and wrote at college a farce, never

acted, a coe of sixteen, The East Indian,

afterwards played for Mrs Jordan's benefit and repeated with great

success, and also a novel, never published, called The Effusions of

Sensibility, which was a burlesque upon the sentimental school He

wrote also what he called "a romance in the style of The Castle of

Otranto," which appeared afterwards as the play of The Castle

Spectre

With his mind thus interested in literature of the roed seventeen, after a summer in Paris, went to

Germany, settled for a time at Weiainst German as hard as ever he could "I have

been introduced," he wrote, in July, 1792, "to M de Goethe, the

celebrated author of Werter, so you must not be surprised if I

should shootof

1793 the youth returned to England, very full of Ger, and with more paper covered ild fancies of his

own After the next Christlas at Bothwell Castle; there was not much

academic work done at Oxford His father's desire was to train him

for the diploue as attache to the British Eun to write his

novel of The Monk, had flagged, but was spurred on at the Hague by a

reading of Mrs Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, a book after his

own heart, and he wrote to his e of writing"

The Monk ritten in ten weeks, and published in the sue enty It was praised, attacked,