he afterwards lamented with brotherly tenderness, was, to the same extent as himself, if not more strongly, a sceptic.  Of this remarkable young man, Matthews, who was so early snatched away, and whose career in after-life, had it been at all answerable to the extraordinary promise of his youth, must have placed him upon a level with the first men of his day, a Memoir was, at one time, intended to be published by his relatives; and to Lord Byron, among others of his college friends, application, for assistance in the task, was addressed.  The letter which this circumstance drew forth from the noble poet, besides containing many amusing traits of his friend, affords such an insight into his own habits of life at this period, that, though infringing upon the chronological order of his correspondence, I shall insert it here.

LETTER 19.

TO MR. MURRAY.

“Ravenna, 9bre 12. 1820.

“What you said of the late Charles Skinner Matthews has set me to my recollections; but I have not been able to turn up any thing which would do for the purposed Memoir of his brother,—­even if he had previously done enough during his life to sanction the introduction of anecdotes so merely personal.  He was, however, a very extraordinary man, and would have been a great one.  No one ever succeeded in a more surpassing degree than he did, as far as he went.  He was indolent, too; but whenever he stripped, he overthrew all antagonists.  His conquests will be found registered at Cambridge, particularly his Downing one, which was hotly and highly contested, and yet easily won.  Hobhouse was his most intimate friend, and can tell you more of him than any man.  William Bankes also a great deal.  I myself recollect more of his oddities than of his academical qualities, for we lived most together at a very idle period of my life.  When I went up to Trinity, in 1805, at the age of seventeen and a half, I was miserable and untoward to a degree.  I was wretched at leaving Harrow, to which I had become attached during the two last years of my stay there; wretched at going to Cambridge instead of Oxford (there were no rooms Vacant at Christ-church); wretched from some private domestic circumstances of different kinds, and consequently about as unsocial as a wolf taken from the troop.  So that, although I knew Matthews, and met him often then at Bankes’s, (who was my collegiate pastor, and master, and patron,) and at Rhode’s, Milnes’s, Price’s, Dick’s, Macnamara’s, Farrell’s, Galley Knight’s, and others of that set of contemporaries, yet I was neither intimate with him nor with any one else, except my old schoolfellow Edward Long (with whom I used to pass the day in riding and swimming), and William Bankes, who was good-naturedly tolerant of my ferocities.