A singular figure now comes upon our stage, Matthew Gregory Lewis, commonly nicknamed “Monk” Lewis, from the title of his famous romance.  It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter Scott’s should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like Lewis.  His “Monk” had been published in 1795, when the author was only twenty.  In 1798 Scott’s friend William Erskine meet Lewis in London.  The latter was collecting materials for his “Tales of Wonder,” and when Erskine showed him Scott’s “William and Helen” and “The Wild Huntsman,” and told him that he had other things of the kind in manuscript, Lewis begged that Scott would contribute to his collection.  Erskine accordingly put him in communication with Scott, who felt highly flattered by the Monk’s request, and wrote to him that his ballads were quite at his service.  Lewis replied, thanking him for the offer.  “A ghost or a witch,” he wrote, “is a sine qua non ingredient in all the dishes of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast.”  Later in the same year Lewis came to Edinburgh and was introduced to Scott, who found him an odd contrast to the grewsome horrors of his books, being a cheerful, foppish, round-faced little man, a follower of fashion and an assiduous tuft-hunter.  “Mat had queerish eyes,” writes his protege:  “they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit.  His person was extremely small and boyish—­he was indeed the least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made. . .  This boyishness went through life with him.  He was a child and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost stories and German romances.  He had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met with—­finer than Byron’s.”

Byron, by the way, had always a kindly feeling for Lewis, though he laughed at him in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”: 

    “O wonder-working Lewis, Monk or Bard,
    Who fain would’st make Parnassus a churchyard;
    Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow;
    Thy muse a sprite, Apollo’s sexton thou;
    Whether on ancient tombs thou tak’st thy stand,
    By gibbering specters hailed, thy kindred band,
    Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page,
    To please the females of our modest age—­
    All hail, M. P.,[32] from whose infernal brain
    Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train;
    At whose command grim women thron in crowds,
    And kings of fire, of water and of clouds,
    With ‘small gray men,’ wild yagers and what not,
    To crown with honor thee and Walter Scott!”

In 1816, while on his way to Italy, Lewis sojourned for a space with Byron and Shelley in their Swiss retreat and set the whole company composing goblin stories.  The most remarkable outcome of this queer symposium was Mrs. Shelley’s abnormal romance, “Frankenstein.”  The signatures of Byron and Shelley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil to Lewis’ will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison Diodati, Geneva; a somewhat rhetorical document in which he provided for the protection of the slaves on his Jamaica plantations.  It was two years after this, and on his return voyage from a visit to these West Indian estates, that Lewis died of yellow fever and was buried at sea.  Byron made this note of it in his diary: