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Kotzebue, under the name of Rolla, the drama superseded by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."