_The Monk_ was written in ten weeks, and published in the summer of 1795, before its author’s age was twenty. It was praised, attacked, said by one review to have neither originality, morals, nor probability to recommend it, yet to have excited and to be continuing to excite the curiosity of the public: a result set down to the “irresistible energy of genius.” Certainly, Lewis did not trouble himself to keep probability in view; he amused himself with wild play of a fancy that delighted in the wonderful. The controversy over _The Monk_ caused the young author to be known as Monk Lewis, and the word Monk has to this day taken the place of the words Matthew Gregory so generally, that many catalogue-makers must innocently suppose him to have been so named at the font. The author of _The Monk_ came back from the Hague to be received as a young lion in London society. When he came of age he entered Parliament for Hindon, in Wiltshire, but seldom went to the House, never spoke in it, and retired after a few sessions. His delight was in the use of the pen; his father, although disappointed by his failure as a statesman, allowed him a thousand a year, and he took a cottage at Barnes, that he might there escape from the world to his ink-bottle. He was a frequent visitor at Inverary Castle, and was fascinated by his host’s daughter, Lady Charlotte Campbell. Still he wrote on. The musical drama of _The Castle Spectre_ was produced in the year after _The Monk_, and it ran sixty nights. He translated next Schiller’s _Kabale und Liebe_ as _The Minister_, but it was not acted till it appeared, with little success, some years afterwards at Covent Garden as _The Harper’s Daughter_. He translated from Kotzebue, under the name of _Rolla_, the drama superseded by Sheridan’s version of the same work as _Pizarro_. Then came the acting, in 1799, of his comedy written in boyhood, _The East Indian_. Then came, in the same year, his first opera, _Adelmorn the Outlaw_; then a tragedy, _Alfonso_, _King of Castile_. Of the origin of this tragedy Lewis gave a characteristic account. “Hearing one day,” he said, “my introduction of negroes into a feudal baron’s castle” (in _The Castle Spectre_) “exclaimed against with as much vehemence as if a dramatic anachronism had been an offence undeserving of benefit of clergy, I said in a moment of petulance, that to prove of how little consequence I esteemed such errors, I would make a play upon the Gunpowder Plot, and make Guy Faux in love with the Emperor Charlemagne’s daughter. By some chance or other, this idea fastened itself upon me, and by dint of turning it in my mind, I at length formed the plot of _Alfonso_.”