ted 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:

"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 L