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    Transcriber’s Notes:

    Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
    possible, including inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and
    punctuation. Some corrections of spelling and punctuation have been
    made. They are listed at the end of the text. Italic text has been marked with _underscores_. MELMOTH
  THE
  WANDERER:
  A
  TALE. BY THE AUTHOR OF “BERTRAM,” &c.

  IN FOUR VOLUMES. VOL. I.

  EDINBURGH:
  PRINTED FOR ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY,
  AND HURST, ROBINSON, AND CO. CHEAPSIDE,
  LONDON. 1820. TO THE
  MOST NOBLE
  THE
  MARCHIONESS OF ABERCORN,
  This Romance
  Is, by her Ladyship’s permission,
  Respectfully inscribed by
  THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. The hint of this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in one of my
Sermons, which (as it is to be presumed very few have read) I shall here
take the liberty to quote. The passage is this. “At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have
    departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his
    word--is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that
    man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his
    salvation?--No, there is not one--not such a fool on earth, were the
    enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!”

This passage suggested the idea of “Melmoth the Wanderer.” The Reader
will find that idea developed in the following pages, with what power or
success _he_ is to decide. The “Spaniard’s Tale” has been censured by a friend to whom I read it,
as containing too much attempt at the revivification of the horrors of
Radcliffe-Romance, of the persecutions of convents, and the terrors of
the Inquisition. I defended myself, by trying to point out to my friend, that I had made
the misery of conventual life depend less on the startling adventures
one meets with in romances, than on that irritating series of petty
torments which constitutes the misery of life in general, and which,
amid the tideless stagnation of monastic existence, solitude gives its
inmates leisure to invent, and power combined with malignity, the full
disposition to practise. I trust this defence will operate more on the
conviction of the Reader, than it did on that of my friend. For the rest of the Romance, there are some parts of it which I have
borrowed from real life. The story of John Sandal and Elinor Mortimer is founded in fact. The original from which the Wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a
living woman, and _long may she live_. I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as
that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that
compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of
subsistence, I should hold myself culpable indeed in having recourse to
any other, but--am I allowed the choice? Dublin,      }
  31st August 1820. } MELMOTH. CHAPTER I. Alive again? Then show me where he is;
    I’ll give a thousand pounds to look upon him. SHAKESPEARE. In the autumn of 1816, John Melmoth, a student in Trinity College,
Dublin, quitted it to attend a dying uncle on whom his hopes for
independence chiefly rested. John was the orphan son of a younger
brother, whose small property scarce could pay John’s college expences;
but the uncle was rich, unmarried, and old; and John, from his infancy,
had been brought up to look on him with that mingled sensation of awe,
and of the wish, without the means to conciliate, (that sensation at
once attractive and repulsive), with which we regard a being who (as
nurse, domestic, and parent have tutored us to believe) holds the very
threads of our existence in his hands, and may prolong or snap them when
he pleases. On receiving this summons, John set immediately out to attend his uncle. The beauty of the country through which he travelled (it was the county
Wicklow) could not prevent his mind from dwelling on many painful
thoughts, some borrowed from the past, and more from the future. His
uncle’s caprice and moroseness,--the strange reports concerning the
cause of the secluded life he had led for many years,--his own dependent
state,--fell like blows fast and heavy on his mind. He roused himself to
repel them,--sat up in the mail, in which he was a solitary
passenger,--looked out on the prospect,--consulted his watch;--then he
thought they receded for a moment,--but there was nothing to fill their
place, and he was forced to invite them back for company. When the mind
is thus active in calling over invaders, no wonder the conquest is soon
completed. As the carriage drew near the Lodge, (the name of old
Melmoth’s seat), John’s heart grew heavier every moment. The recollection of this awful uncle from infancy,--when he was never
permitted to approach him without innumerable lectures,--_not to be
troublesome_,--not to go too near his uncle,--not to ask him any
questions,--on no account to disturb the inviolable arrangement of his
snuff-box, hand-bell, and spectacles, nor to suffer the glittering of
the gold-headed cane to tempt him to the mortal sin of handling
it,--and, finally, to pilot himself aright through his perilous course
in and out of the apartment without striking against the piles of books,
globes, old newspapers, wig-blocks, tobacco-pipes, and snuff-cannisters,
not to mention certain hidden rocks of rat-traps and mouldy books
beneath the chairs,--together with the final reverential bow at the
door, which was to be closed with cautious gentleness, and the stairs to
be descended as if he were “shod with felt.”--This recollection was
carried on to his school-boy years, when at Christmas and Easter, the
ragged poney, the jest of the school, was dispatched to bring the
reluctant visitor to the Lodge,--where his pastime was to sit vis-a-vis
to his uncle, without speaking or moving, till the pair resembled Don
Raymond and the ghost of Beatrice in the Monk,--then watching him as he
picked the bones of lean mutton out of his mess of weak broth, the
latter of which he handed to his nephew with a needless caution not to
“take more than he liked,”--then hurried to bed by day-light, even in
winter, to save the expence of an inch of candle, where he lay awake and
restless from hunger, till his uncle’s retiring at eight o’clock gave
signal to the governante of the meagre household to steal up to him with
some fragments of her own scanty meal, administering between every
mouthful a whispered caution not to tell his uncle.