After the next Christmas he returned to Oxford. There was a
visit to Lord Douglas at Bothwell Castle; there was not much
academic work done at Oxford. His father's desire was to train him
for the diplomatic service, and in the summer of 1794 he went to the
Hague as attache to the British Embassy. He had begun to write his
novel of The Monk, had flagged, but was spurred on at the Hague by a
reading of Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, a book after his
own heart, and he wrote to his mother at this time, "You see I am
horribly bit by the rage of writing."
The Monk was written in ten weeks, and published in the summer of
1795, before its author's age was twenty. It was praised, attacked,
said by one review to have neither originality, morals, nor
probability to recommend it, yet to have excited and to be
continuing to excite the curiosity of the public: a result set down
to the "irresistible energy of genius." Certainly, Lewis did not
trouble himself to keep probability in view; he amused himself with
wild play of a fancy that delighted in the wonderful. The
controversy over The Monk caused the young author to be known as
Monk Lewis, and the word Monk has to this day taken the place of the
words Matthew Gregory so generally, that many catalogue-makers must
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.
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