Melmoth the Wanderer

by Charles Maturin

  CHAPTER XXIII

  1. If he…mine: Unidentified; possibly by Maturin himself.

  2. Gone to be married: Shakespeare, King John, III, i, 1. It is in fact a rhetorical question from Constance when she hears that Lewis the Dauphin is to marry Blanch, and that France and England are to have an alliance.

  3. overcasting: Covering already existent embroidery, by means of an overcast stitch, often to produce relief, or prevent fraying.

  4. Mr Peter’s puppet-show: Don Quixote, Pt II, Ch. xxvi. Thinking it real, Don Quixote attacks the puppet-show of Master Peter with his sword, and cuts it all to ribbons.

  5. Minima…sui: She is the smallest part of herself.

  6. Neophyte: A beginner, novice (from Gr. neophyta: a young plant). The metaphor is carried on in ‘sprout’.

  7. Campeador: The Cid, who was called Mio Cid el Campeador (my lord the Champion) (d.1099). Gonsalvo di Cordova:

  Gonzalo Fernandes Hernandez y Aguilar (1443–1515), ‘El Gran Capitan’, Spanish general who fought successfully for Ferdinand II of Naples against the French, and restored Zante and Cephalonia to the Venetians, taking them from the Turks.

  8. atramentum: Lit. ‘black fluid’. The analogy is with bile.

  9. lituras: Corrections.

  10. macerate: To cause the body to waste or wear away, esp. by fasting (OED). But it is also commonly used for the practice of scourging.

  11. Moloch: Properly, Molech, an Ammonite God, mentioned in i Kings xi, 7, as an ‘abomination’, to whom infants and children are sacrificed by fire.

  12. seguedilla: Seguidilla, a type of Spanish song.

  13. Polyglot: i.e. the Polyglott Bible (OED’s earliest ref. 1673). Here, a crib for priestly study, to acquaint the ignorant Fra Jose with the Greek original of the Testament.

  14. Pliny, Artemidore: Pliny the Elder: Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD23–79), writer on natural history.

  Artemidore: Artemidorus Daldianus (2nd century AD) of Ephesus, in Roman Asia, author of Oneirocritica (‘Interpretation of Dreams’).

  15. Apparebat…confectus: See above, note 1 to Ch. III.

  16. in transitu: In passing.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  1. ‘Responde…argumentum’: (Lit.) ‘Reply to my argument-a name is a name – therefore what is your name-reply to my argument…’, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wit at Several Weapons, I. Slightly misquoted. Old Sir Perfidious Oldcraft, fallen among his son’s sharkish companions, seeks to test whether the Latin of the poor scholar Priscian is fake or genuine. The analogy is with Isadora’s persistent interrogation of the Wanderer before their mysterious, diabolic marriage.

  2. a banditti: The plural of Ital. ‘bandito’, here used as a collective singular noun: a band of robbers. These figures conventionally appear in Salvator Rosa’s painting, and in Ann Radcliffe, especially in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

  3. I believe in a God…: James ii, 19: ‘Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.’ Here Melmoth identifies himself, by means of the allusion, as a devil.

  4. pages…these: Refers to the original of Adonijah’s manuscript, which Monçada is copying.

  5. testimonies: Acts of martyrdom (in Gr. martyras is a witness); here it is suggested that the Wanderer is suspended in the fires of hell like Mephistopheles, for all eternity, in a continuous act of faith or ‘testimony’.

  6. Here Monçada…expressed his surprise…: While he spoke of what he had written.

  CHAPTER XXV

  1. Homer, Iliad, xxiii, 72. See above, Note 1 to Ch. VI.

  2. at ease in his possessions: Blair, The Grave, 350–51.

  3. Don Quixote, Pt I, ch. ii (last para.).

  4. Toledo: The most important political and social centre of Castile up to the foundation of Madrid, Toledo was traditionally rich from its metal working and armoury.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  1. Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Pt III, 196–8: The Nightmare Life-in-Death is playing dice with Death for the ship’s crew, and she wins.

  2. change of circumstances: Maturin’s own Huguenot ancestors had fled the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685.

  3. Maestro di Capello: Choirmaster.

  4. Hebes: The cup-bearers of Olympus (after the original Hebe, a daughter of Zeus who performed this function). Often used to describe women in their youthful prime.

  5. Teniers or Wouverman: David Teniers the Younger (1610–90) and Philip Wouverman (1619–68), painters of Dutch interiors and family groups.

  6. pinners: A coif with two long flaps, one on each side, pinned on and hanging down, and sometimes fastened at the breast; worn by women, especially of rank, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sometimes applied to the flaps and the adjunct of the coif.

  7. shadow…land: Isa. xxxii, 2: ‘And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.’

  8. so…eternal: 2 Cor. iv, 18. For St Paul, it is a question, not of ‘passing through’ temporal things, but of ‘looking at things not seen’ which are eternal.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  1. Quæque…fui: The sights most piteous that I myself saw, and where of I was no small part (Virgil, Aeneid, ii, 5–6: Grant). At Dido’s request, Aeneas prepares to tell what he saw at the destruction of Troy.

  2. Hidalgoes: Gentlemen by birth.

  3. en prise: In thrall, taken.

  4. The sacrifice…despise: Ps. li, 17: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, Oh God, thou will not despise.’ The aspect of contrition is not present in Ines’s view of her husband’s situation.

  5. Quid multis morer: Why do I delay so much? (Terence, Andria, 114: Grant). ‘I’ refers to the narrator. The phrase is often used in Roman drama as a rhetorical tag: in short, to cut a long story short.

  6. δακρυoεν γελαoαoα: Smiling through her tears (Homer, Iliad, vi, 484: Grant). i.e. Andromache, who weeps for Hector’s fate, while smiling at their infant son.

  7. vis impotentiæ: ‘Force of impotence’. Another oxymoron: an attempt to reanimate the paradox in ‘feeble strength’.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  1. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, ii, 206: Horatio’s first electrifying report of seeing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, a major source of rhetoric for the Gothic novel. In this case an analogy for the appearance of the Stranger.

  2. lifted up his voice and wept: Gen. xxvii, 38. Esau’s bitter complaint to his father Isaac. The phrase marks a clear expression of emotion.

  3. a sore evil: Eccles. v, 13 (Grant); i.e. ‘riches kept for the owners there of to their hurt’. Here it is used to describe the way they are not allowed to be taught Spanish, because they are heretics.

  4. one day telleth another: Ps. xix, 2 (Grant); a violent reversal of context: ‘Day unto day uttereth speech, and night into night sheweth knowledge.’ Nature continuously reveals God’s handiwork, whereas Maturin uses it for monotony.

  5. the first of painters: It may be that we are not required to provide a candidate, but Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson might be an appropriate model.

  6. taken from the evil to come: Isa. Ivii. 1. Here the context gives a perfect application: death is a consolation for the righteous.

  7. rivelled: Shrivelled.

  8. any of those painters…as it lay: St Laurence, martyred by being roasted on a gridiron, is a standard subject in Renaissance and Florentine painting. St Bartholomew is said to have been flayed alive and beheaded by the Babylonian King Astyages. His relics were taken to St Bartholomew in the Tiber, Rome. Caravaggio is surely in Maturin’s mind, but also perhaps the various earlier Florentine and Venetian painters, who delight in the erotic contradictions of St Sebastian’s martyrdom.

  9. styptics: Remedies for haemorrhage.

  10. pale as the widow of Seneca: i.e. from loss of blood. Paulina attempted to follow her husband by opening her veins, after his
inculpation in the conspiracy of Piso. But she was prevented by Nero.

  11. the mother of witchcrafts and spiritual seduction: the phrase is the symptom of Ines’s Protestant training; a standard description of Roman Catholicism as the whore of Babylon.

  12. voluntary humility: Col. ii,18. Paul inveighs here against religiosity.

  13. destitute…tormented: Heb. xi, 37. Paul recalls the sufferings of the Jews and attributes them to their faith. Ines tries to take heart from Paul.

  14. ensamples: Examples.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  1. Woe ‘tis to love not, and to love is woe;

  But worst it is of woes

  To love and lose.

  (Anacreontea, xxix, 1–4. Loeb trans.)

  2. Punic faith: Treachery. The Romans distrusted the Carthaginians.

  3. amid a labyrinth of rocks: Don Quixote, Pt I, ch. xxix. There is no further description of the landscape in which they find Quixote in this passage in Cervantes’ text.

  4. de Collibus Ubedæ: See Cervantes, in Don Quixote, concerning the Hills of Ubeda. The allusion is in Pt II, ch. xliii.

  5. metal…attractive: Shakespeare, Hamlet, 111, ii, 109–10. Hamlet’s tormenting remark about Ophelia to Gertrude in the play scene which turns the latter into a (failed) sexual competitor.

  6. Richard and Richmond: Richard III (1452–85) and Henry Earl of Richmond (1457–1509), who will become Henry VII. Bosworth Field (1485) resulted in the defeat and death of Richard III, the last Yorkist King, and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII which, in its emblem, combined the White Rose (York) and Red (Lancaster), ending thirty years of warfare.

  7. Tyndal in Holland: William Tyndale (d. 1536) actually printed his translation of the New Testament in Germany (at Cologne and Worms). His Old Testament translations were printed at Marburg (Grant).

  8. the then favourite of the Queen: Robert Dudley (1532–88), Earl of Leicester. Later, after his seduction of Elizabeth’s favourite lady-in-waiting, Lettice Knollys, their secret marriage, and his subsequent espousal of the Puritan cause, Leicester fell out of favour with Elizabeth.

  9. jesses: In falconry, the short straps attached to each of the legs of a hawk.

  10. the misguided Laud: William Laud (1573–1645), the anti-Puritan Archbishop of Canterbury, was executed for treason.

  the unfortunate Strafford: Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford (1593–1641) – unfortunate, because after his failure to quell the Scottish revolt of 1639, he was impeached by Parliament and executed.

  11. Let the praises…hands: Ps. cxlix, 6. Mortimer’s second son is an apostate.

  12. Punctuation garbled by misquotation: to make clear sense, the opening lines from Milton’s poem should read:

  Because you have thrown off your prelate lord,

  And with stiff vows renounced his liturgy,

  To seize the widow’d whore Plurality

  From them whose sin ye envied, and not

  abhorred,…

  13. bartizan: A small battlemented turret, projecting at right angles from the main battlements of a castle; the term appears to have been invented by Sir Walter Scott, which is probably where Maturin found it.

  14. Colonel Pride: Thomas Pride (d. 1658), the Roundhead soldier who commanded a regiment at Naseby and signed Charles I’s death warrant as a Parliamentary Commissioner.

  15. Thou.…Sandal: John i, 27; this lugubrious joke is founded on John the Baptist’s phrase, describing his own unworthiness to unfasten even the latchet of Jesus’s shoe.

  16. Hugh Peters: The Independent divine (1598–1660) and powerful preacher, executed as an abettor of the execution of Charles I.

  17. Ranters: A sect under the Commonwealth who rejected all authority.

  Antinomians: Followers of Johannes Agricola, an extreme Calvinist sect (whose name, from Gr. anti, against, and nomos, law, means ‘against the law’), feared as thinking themselves guided only by conscience, not the law.

  18. fifth-monarchy man: One who believed that Christ’s Second Coming was near at hand, as foretold in Dan. ii, 44.

  19. Cameronians: Reformed Presbyterians who attacked the Bishops and refused their allegiance to Kings. Named after their leader, Richard Cameron (d.1680), the Scottish Covenanter and field preacher.

  20. the Episcopalian system: The Bishops.

  21. Apostate: One who abandons his religious principles, a renegade, turncoat; i.e. the second son, who became a Puritan.

  22. a brand…burning: Amos iv, 11.

  23. Monk: George, Duke of Albemarle (1608–70), General Monk, who brought about the Restoration of the Monarchy (‘the banished family’ = the Stuarts) in 1660.

  24. Lord…salvation: Luke ii, 29–30 (Grant). The words of the patient Simeon who is permitted to see the infant Christ, and thus the future, before he dies. The analogy with the Restoration is an apt and plausible one for ‘the old loyalist’.

  CHAPTER XXX

  1. William Cowper, The Task, Bk I, 540–41.

  2. euthanasia: A gentle and easy death.

  3. Ask…kingdom: Mark vi, 23. The daughter of Herodias dances and pleases Herod. When he offers her anything, as here, she asks for the head of John the Baptist.

  4. Catherine of Braganza: (1638–1705), queen of Charles II.

  5. the Duchess of Cleveland: Barbara Villiers (1641–1709), supplanted as mistress of Charles II by Louise Renée de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth (1649–1734).

  6. Taylor: The Acts and Monuments (otherwise known as the ‘Book of Martyrs’) was by JohnFoxe (1516–87), not by Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), Bishop of Dromore.

  7. had read… 1525: François Mezeray (1610–83), Jacques-August de Thou (1553–1617), and Maximilian de Bethune, Duc de Sully (1559–1641), are French historians.

  8. cum multis aliis: Along with many others.

  9. Fairfax: Edward Fairfax (c. 1575–1635), poet and translator of Tasso.

  10. in Quintum Novembris…abomination: Properly Quintem: on the Fifth of November. Composed in 1626 when Milton was seventeen, but not published until 1645, this is a floridly propagandist, anti-Catholic celebration of the failure of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, in the Latin style of the descent to Hades of Virgil’s Aeneid, Bk VI.

  11. Then…satisfaction: Aliaga’s interjection serves to remind us that this is a story within a story within Monçada’s story, which is being told to Melmoth’s descendant in 1816.

  12. In…beds: These lines are all from Shakespeare, Richard II, V, i, 40–45; adapted to the diction of oral history.

  13. We…times: Shakespeare, Richard III, I, 4: Clarence’s dream – he and Richard walk the deck, and recall the Wars of the Roses. Again, the theme is the oral recounting of history.

  14. invested: Attacked.

  15. hewed to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal: the fate of Agag, who was cut into pieces (1 Sam. xv, 33) (Grant).

  16. crows: Crowbars.

  17. j’ai fait mon devoir: I have done my duty.

  18. Sacharissa: (From Gr) Sweetest one. Lady Dorothy Sidney, later Countess of Sunderland (1617–84), the ‘Sacharissa’ of Edmund Waller’s poetry; Lady Sophia Murray was supposed to have been Waller’s ‘Amoret’ – i.e. ‘little Venus’.

  19. Lucius, Lord Falkland: Viscount Falkland (1600–1643), courtier and soldier, philosopher and poet.

  20. that Nazareth…abhorrence: i.e. she behaves towards the Presbyterians as Nero towards the followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

  21. Guide’s: Guido Reni (1575–1642), the Italian painter.

  22. the unfortunate queen of Virgil: Dido, Queen of Carthage, who stabbed herself and threw herself on a pyre as Aeneas sailed away to his destiny as the hero of Rome (Aeneid, IV, 641ff.).

  23. The war with the Dutch: Began in 1665.

  24. Sir Walter Raleigh…calamitous expedition: He was released from the Tower in 1616 to go on an expedition to search for gold on the Orinoco. He failed to find it, and was executed after he returned in 1618.

  25. De Ruyter: Michael de Ruyter
(1607–76), Admiral of the Dutch Fleet.

  26. Opdam…blew up: On 3 June 1665 (Grant).

  27.…and Mr Boyle: The engagement, in which they were all killed by a single ball, took place off Lowestoft on 3 June 1665.

  28. Micyllus: Mycellus, inspired by Hercules in a dream to found Crotona. The honey seems to have come from another story.

  29. aidant: Helpful.

  30. the savour…death: 2 Cor. ii, 16.

  31. chapter: Assembly of the cations of a collegiate or cathedral church, a body of Knights.

  32. guerdon: Reward. A chivalric term.

  33. vermeil: Stained with vermilion, bright red.

  34. fitter…Campania: A paraphrase of Livy. The Carthaginian General Hannibal, after leading his army across the Alps and defeating the Romans, spent the winter in soft living on the plains of Campania.

  35. like the ancient statue: Of Memnon at Thebes.

  36. They…waters: Ps. cvii, 23 (Grant).

  37. apples that were flung in their path: Atalanta, fleetest of foot, made all her suitors run a race with her, on pain of death if she won. Melanion had golden balls strewn in her path which distracted her and allowed him to win.

  38. marriage…palatine: The daughter of James I married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613.

  39. vicinage: Neighbourhood.

  40. plaits: Folds.

  41. Prynne: William Prynne, the Puritan moralist, writer, and preacher, was sentenced by the Star Chamber to have his ears cut off and to stand in the pillory in 1634.

  42. she…there: Gen. xliii, 30. It is Joseph who weeps secretly.

  43. the painting of the great Italian artist: Untraced. This is likely to be an early Renaissance painter like Giotto.

  44. Histriomastrix: Published in 1632, Prynne’s diatribe against stage-plays. This caused his sentence: his attack on the stage was taken to be anti-Royalist propaganda.

  45. Bartholomew bushel: The Act of Uniformity came into force on St Bartholomew’s Day, 1662, whereby one-fifth of the English clergy were expelled from their parishes as nonconformists.