They are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.
Still, _Vatheks_ are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted, to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century, some other kind had to be supplied.

The chief accredited purveyors of it have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel, now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of the eighteenth century.
It is, however, unjust to put the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_ and the author of _The Monk_ on the same level.

Mat Lewis was a clever boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and no faculty of self-criticism to correct it.

The famous _Monk_ (1795), which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as _Otranto_ and adds to its preposterousness a _haut gout_ of atrocity and indecency which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of letters, to attempt or to tolerate.

Lewis's other work in various forms is less offensive: but--except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not here concern us--hardly any of it is literature.