With his mind thus interested in literature of the romantic form,
young Lewis, aged seventeen, after a summer in Paris, went to
Germany, settled for a time at Weimar, and, as he told his mother,
knocked his brains against 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 shoot myself one of these fine mornings." In the spring of
1793 the youth returned to England, very full of German romantic
tale and song, and with more paper covered with wild fancies of his
own. After the next Christmas he returned to Oxford. There was a
visit to Lord Douglas at Bothwell Castle; there was not much
academic work done at Oxford. His father's desire was to train him
for the diplomatic service, and in the summer of 1794 he went to the
Hague as attache to the British Embassy. He had begun 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 mother at this time, "You see I am
horribly bit by the rage of writing."

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