“I’d give the lands of Deloraine
    Dark Musgrave were alive again,”

that is,

    “I would give many a sugar cane
    Monk Lewis were alive again.”

Scott’s modesty led him to depreciate his own verses as compared with Lewis’, some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of their author, says Lockhart, “with rapture.”  But however fine an ear for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos which distinguishes his poetry: 

    “A toad still alive in the liquor she threw,
    And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew: 
    And ever, the cauldron as over she bent,
    She muttered strange words of mysterious intent:” 

or this from the same ballad:[33]

    “Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor,
    Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore;
    A little jet ring from her finger then drew,
    Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view.”

Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic turn from his mother, a sentimental little dame whose youthful looks caused her often to be taken for Mat’s sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to novels.  The poor lady was something of a blue-stocking and aspired, herself, to literary honors.  Lewis’ devotion to her is very charming, and the elder-brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing.  But he had a dislike of “female authorship”:  and the rumor having reached his ear that his mother had written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to print them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to stay her hand.  “I hold that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that, in proportion as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy.  I always consider a female author as a sort of half-man.”  He was also, quite properly, shocked at some gossip which attributed “The Monk,” to his mother instead of to his mother’s son.

We read in the “Life and Correspondence of Matthew Gregory Lewis” (2 vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis’ favorite books was “Glanvil on Witches.”  Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose “Vanity of Dogmatizing,"[34] and “Sadduceismus Triumphatus” rebuked the doubter and furnished arguments for Cotton Mather’s “Wonders of the Invisible World” (1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of “The Drummer.”  Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil’s pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr. Mompesson’s house.  In