“It was not till 1807, after I had been upwards of a year away from Cambridge, to which I had returned again to reside for my degree, that I became one of Matthews’s familiars, by means of H——­, who, after hating me for two years, because I wore a white hat, and a grey coat, and rode a grey horse (as he says himself), took me into his good graces because I had written some poetry.  I had always lived a good deal, and got drunk occasionally, in their company—­but now we became really friends in a morning.  Matthews, however, was not at this period resident in College.  I met him chiefly in London, and at uncertain periods at Cambridge.  H——­, in the mean time, did great things:  he founded the Cambridge ‘Whig Club’ (which he seems to have forgotten), and the ‘Amicable Society,’ which was dissolved in consequence of the members constantly quarrelling, and made himself very popular with ‘us youth,’ and no less formidable to all tutors, professors, and beads of Colleges.  William B——­ was gone; while he stayed, he ruled the roast—­or rather the roasting—­and was father of all mischiefs.

“Matthews and I, meeting in London, and elsewhere, became great cronies.  He was not good tempered—­nor am I—­but with a little tact his temper was manageable, and I thought him so superior a man, that I was willing to sacrifice something to his humours, which were often, at the same time, amusing and provoking.  What became of his papers (and he certainly had many), at the time of his death, was never known.  I mention this by the way, fearing to skip it over, and as he wrote remarkably well, both in Latin and English.  We went down to Newstead together, where I had got a famous cellar, and Monks’ dresses from a masquerade warehouse.  We were a company of some seven or eight, with an occasional neighbour or so for visiters, and used to sit up late in our friars’ dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the skull-cup, and all sorts of glasses, and buffooning all round the house, in our conventual garments.  Matthews always denominated me ‘the Abbot,’ and never called me by any other name in his good humours, to the day of his death.  The harmony of these our symposia was somewhat interrupted, a few days after our assembling, by Matthews’s threatening to throw ——­ out of a window, in consequence of I know not what commerce of jokes ending in this epigram. ——­ came to me and said, that ’his respect and regard for me as host would not permit him to call out any of my guests, and that he should go to town next morning.’  He did.  It was in vain that I represented to him that the window was not high, and that the turf under it was particularly soft.  Away he went.