Transcribed from the 1886 Cassell & Company edition byDavid Price,

CASSELL’S NATIONALLIBRARY.

THE
Bravo of Venice
A ROMANCE.

TRANSLATEDFROM THE GERMAN

BY
M. G. LEWIS.

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS,NEW YORK &MELBOURNE.
1886.

INTRODUCTION.

Matthew Gregory Lewis, whoprofessed to have translated this romance out of the German, verymuch, I believe, as Horace Walpole professed to have taken TheCastle of Otranto from an old Italian manuscript, was born in1775 of a wealthy family.  His father had an estate in Indiaand a post in a Government office.  His mother was daughterto Sir Thomas Sewell, Master of the Rolls in the reign of GeorgeIII.  She was a young mother; her son Matthew was devoted toher from the first.  As a child he called her“Fanny,” and as a man held firmly by her when she wasdeserted by her husband.  From Westminster School, M. G.Lewis passed to Christ Church, Oxford.  Already he was busyover tales and plays, and wrote at college a farce, never acted,a comedy, written at the age of sixteen, The East Indian,afterwards played for Mrs. Jordan’s benefit and repeatedwith great success, and also a novel, never published, calledThe Effusions of Sensibility, which was a burlesque uponthe sentimental school.  He wrote also what he called“a romance in the style of The Castle ofOtranto,” which appeared afterwards as the play ofThe Castle Spectre.

With his mind thus interested in literature of the romanticform, young Lewis, aged seventeen, after a summer in Paris, wentto Germany, settled for a time at Weimar, and, as he told hismother, knocked his brains against German as hard as ever hecould.  “I have been introduced,” he wrote, inJuly, 1792, “to M. de Goethe, the celebrated author ofWerter, so you must not be surprised if I should shootmyself one of these fine mornings.”  In the spring of1793 the youth returned to England, very full of German romantictale and song, and with more paper covered with wild fancies ofhis own.  After the next Christmas he returned toOxford.  There was a visit to Lord Douglas at BothwellCastle; there was not much academic work done at Oxford. His father’s desire was to train him for the diplomaticservice, and in the summer of 1794 he went to the Hague asattaché to the British Embassy.  He had begun towrite his novel of The Monk, had flagged, but was spurredon at the Hague by a reading of Mrs. Radcliffe’sMysteries of Udolpho, a book after his own heart, and hewrote to his mother at this time, “You see I am horriblybit by the rage of writing.”

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