nd 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 da