MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT

MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT, a poet and romance writer, was born at Dublin in 1782, of a family of French extraction. After completing his education at Trinity College in his native city, Maturin took orders, and became a clergyman of the Established Church of Ireland, with the curacy of St. Peter's for his preferment. His leisure hours were divided between the irksome duties of a classical tutor, by which he managed to augment his scanty income, and the much more congenial occupation of romance composition. He came before the public for the first time in 1807 as the author of a novel entitled Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio, written in a terrific and gloomy style, after the manner of Monk Lewis, displaying some genius and much bombast, and strongly dashed with the mysterious colouring of the Castle of Udolpho. Having enjoyed considerable popularity by his efforts as a novelist, Maturin next directed his efforts to dramatic composition, and produced in 1816 a wild and powerful tragedy named Bertram, which, through the influence of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, was performed at Drury Lane, where it met with surprising success. The Scottish novelist spoke of it as "one of those things which will either succeed greatly or be damned gloriously, for its merits are marked, deep, and striking, and its faults of a nature obnoxious to ridicule." Elated by his success, and rendered extravagant in his expectations by the £1,000 which he realized through his tragedy, Maturin forgot to be provident, and plunged himself into inextricable embarrassments, from which the generous liberality of Scott and others could not rescue him. He prosecuted his literary projects, however, but found that to be haunted by bailiffs was not favourable for the development of his genius. His tragedy of Manuel accordingly, which appeared during the ensuing year, proved a very inferior production: "The absurd work," as Byron said, "of a clever man." Maturin continued his efforts in romantic fiction; and in addition to The Milesian Chief, and The Wild Irish Boy, previously published under the assumed name of "Dennis Jasper Murphy," he wrote

Women, or Pour et Contre, and Melmoth the Wanderer, the wildest of his romances. The hero, a sort of absurd Dr Faustus, lives a century and a half, and by the help of the devil performs all manner of incredible adventures. The school of Ann Radcliffe reaches the culmination of loathsome horror and sickening extravagance in the person of this demoniac hero of Maturin's. "Eva," in Women, is the most simple and truthful of this author's delineations. The Albigenes, his last work, published in 1824 in 4 vols., proved tedious and uninteresting, possessing many of the defects of his previous works, and few of their excellences. His characters want variety, his humour is clumsy, and he has no genius for plot; yet his works display scenes of deep passion and touching pathos, coloured with the rich lights of a poetical imagination. In addition to the works already mentioned, Maturin published a tragedy called Fredolpho; a poem on The Universe; and a volume of sermons, London, 1819, characterized by much of the eloquence he is said to have possessed as a preacher. He died on the 30th October 1824.