A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 30

On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement had greater momentum. The _Grundlichkeit_, the depth and thoroughness of the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its practice a theoria, an _aesthetik_. In the later history of German romanticism, the medieval revival in letters and art was carried out with a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and Catholicism. Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, it was more critical, learned, and conscious of its own purposes and methods than the kindred movement in England. The English mind, in the act of creation, works practically and instinctively. It seldom seeks to bring questions of taste or art under the domain of scientific laws. During the cla.s.sical period it had accepted its standards of taste from France, and when it broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and gave either no reasons, or very superficial ones, for its new departure. The elegant dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant, Fichte, and Sch.e.l.ling; or beside thorough-going _Abhandlungen_ like the "Laoc.o.o.n," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber nave and sentimentalische Dichtung," or the a.n.a.lysis of Hamlet's character in "Wilhelm Meister." There was no criticism of this kind in England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, in particular, to compare with the papers on that subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg, Lenz, Goethe, and many other Germans. The only eighteenth-century Englishman who would have been capable of such was Gray. He had the requisite taste and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic breadth and depth for a fundamental and _eingehend_ treatment of underlying principles.

Yet even in this critical department, German literary historians credit England with the initiative. Hettner[15] mentions three English critics, in particular, as predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in popular poetry. These were Edward Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," whose "Conjectures on Original Composition" was published in 1759: Robert Wood, whose "Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer" (1768) was translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert Lowth, Bishop of Oxford, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford delivered there in 1753 his "Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum," translated into English and German in 1793. The significance of Young's brilliant little essay, which was in form a letter addressed to the author of "Sir Charles Grandison," lay in its a.s.sertion of the superiority of genius to learning and of the right of genius to be free from rules and authorities. It was a sort of literary declaration of independence; and it asked, in substance, the question asked in Emerson's "Nature": "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Pope had said, in his "Essay on Criticism,"[16] "follow Nature," and in order to follow Nature, learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer. "Nature and Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young says: "The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. . .

Learning . . . is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed examples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to which genius often owes its supreme glory. . . Born _originals_, how comes it to pa.s.s that we die _copies_?. . . Let not great examples or authorities browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . While the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground; he [the imitative writer], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the sacred footsteps of great examples with the blind veneration of a bigot saluting the sacred toe." Young a.s.serts that Shakspere is equal in greatness to the ancients: regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse in his translation of Homer, and calls Addison's "Cato" "a piece of statuary."

Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of Balbec and Palmrya, took his Iliad to the Troad and read it on the spot. He sailed in the track of Menelaus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance with Eastern scenery and life helped to subst.i.tute a fresher apprehension of Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through the cla.s.sical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and popular character (_Ursprunglichkeit, Volksthumlichkeit_) of the Homeric poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's translations as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew Arnold, who insists upon Homer's "n.o.bility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating when propounded in 1768.

Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh and had just attained his majority.

"Romance who loves to nod and sing With drowsy head and folded wing, To _him_ a painted paroquet Had been--a most familiar bird-- Taught _him_ his alphabet to say, To lisp his very earliest word."[19]

He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making his collection of _memorabilia_; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes, border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with pa.s.sages from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal, from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superst.i.tious memory; tables of the Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that year, a cla.s.s of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by Henry Mackenzie, the "Addison of the North," and author of that most sentimental fictions, "The Man of Feeling." "The literary persons of Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character. . . Their fict.i.tious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British literati." Scott's German studies were much a.s.sisted by Alexander Frazer Tytler, whose version of Schiller's "Robbers" was one of the earliest English translations from the German theater.[20]

In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a party at Dugald Stewart's by reading a translation of Burger's ghastly ballad "Lenore." The translation was by William Taylor of Norwich; it had not yet been published, and Miss Aikin read it from a ma.n.u.script copy. Scott was not present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the performance to him; and he was so much impressed by his description that he borrowed a volume of Burger's poems from his young kinswoman by marriage, Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Bruhl of Martkirchen, formerly Saxon amba.s.sador at London, who had a Scotchwoman for his second wife, the dowager Countess of Egremont. Scott set to work in 1795 to make a translation of the ballad for himself, and succeeded so well in pleasing his friends that he had a few copies struck off for private circulation in the spring of 1796. In the autumn of the same year he published his version under the t.i.tle "William and Helen," together with "The Chase," a translation of Burger's "Der Wilde Jager." The two poems made a thin quarto volume. It was printed at Edinburgh, was anonymous, and was Walter Scott's first published book. Meanwhile Taylor had given his rendering to the public in the March number of the _Monthly Magazine_, introducing it with a notice of Burger's poems; and the very same year witnessed the appearance of three other translations, one by J.

T. Stanley (with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James Pye, the poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William Robert Spencer,--author of "Beth Gelert." "Too Late I Stayed," etc.,--with designs by Lady Diana Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says Allibone, in folio, on vellum, sold at Christie's in 1804 for L25 4s.) A sixth translation, by the Rev.

James Beresford, who had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800; and Schlegel and Brandl unite in p.r.o.nouncing this the most faithful, if not the best, English version of the ballad.[21]

The poem of which England had taken such manifold possession, under the varied t.i.tles "Lenore," "Leonore," "Leonora," "Lenora," "Ellenore,"

"Helen," etc., was indeed a noteworthy one. In the original, it remains Burger's masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained perhaps as many graces as it lost. It was first printed at Gottingen in Boie's "Musen Almanach" in 1773. It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her off a thousand miles to the bridal bed. She mounts behind him and they ride through the phantasms of the night till, at c.o.c.k-crow, they come to a churchyard. The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover's armor drops from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within, and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and her bridegroom is Death. "This poem," says Scherer, "leaves on us, to some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened; was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed, with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel"; so that the boundary between the earthly and the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer form of allegory. "Lenore" drew for its materials upon ballad motives common to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention "Sweet William's Ghost," as an English example of the cla.s.s.

Scott's friends a.s.sured him that his translation was superior to Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: "The ghost nowhere makes his appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer."

But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, which has a wildness and quaintness not found in Scott's more literal and more polished rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the _Grobheit_, the rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas from each will ill.u.s.trate the difference:

[From Scott's "William and Helen."]

"Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear:-- Dost fear to ride with me?

Hurrah! Hurrah! the dead can ride"-- "O William, let them be!"

"See there! see there! What yonder swings And creaks 'mid whistling rain?"

"Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel; A murd'rer in his chain.

"Halloa! Thou felon, follow here: To bridal bed we ride; And thou shalt prance a fetter dance Before me and my bride."

And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash!

The wasted form descends,[23]

And fleet as wind through hazel bush The wild career attends.[23]

Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode, Splash, splash! along the sea: The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, The flashing pebbles flee.

[From Taylor's "Lenora."]

Look up, look up, an airy crewe In roundel dances reele.

The moone is bryghte and blue the night, May'st dimly see them wheel.[24]

"Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe, Come to and follow me.

And daunce for us the wedding daunce When we in bed shall be."

And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew Come wheeling o'er their heads, All rustling like the withered leaves That wyde the whirlwind spreads.

Halloo! halloo! Away they goe Unheeding wet or drye, And horse and rider snort and blowe, And sparkling pebbles flye.

And all that in the moonshine lay Behynde them fled afar; And backward scudded overhead The skye and every star.

Tramp, tramp across the land they speede, Splash, splash across the sea: "Hurrah! the dead can ride apace, Dost fear to ride with me?"

It was this stanza which fascinated Scott, as repeated from memory by Mr.

Cranstoun; and he retained it without much change in his version. There is no mention of the sea in Burger, whose hero is killed in the battle of Prague and travels only by land. But Taylor nationalized and individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Burger's poem was written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish a.s.sociations, as the best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and, indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German."

Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Burger's next most popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in the _Monthly Magazine_ for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd t.i.tle of "The La.s.s of Fair Wone."

Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his translations and critical papers in the _Monthly Magazine_ and _Monthly Review_, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England.

When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia, and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England.

"When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin, "there was probably no English translation of any German author but through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Burger in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora"

he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30 he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the _Edinburgh Review_. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by the slight s.p.a.ce accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27]

The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the English and German romantic movements. It seems a little strange that so healthy a genius as Walter Scott should have made his _debut_ in an exhibition of the horrible. Lockhart reports him, on the authority of Sir Alexander Wood, as reading his "William and Helen" over to that gentleman "in a very slow and solemn tone," and then looking at the fire in silence and presently exclaiming. "I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones."

Whereupon Sir Alexander accompanied him to the house of John Bell, surgeon, where the desired articles were obtained and mounted upon the poet's bookcase. During the next few years, Scott continued to make translations of German ballads, romances, and chivalry dramas. These remained for the present in ma.n.u.script; and some of them, indeed, such as his versions of Babo's "Otto von Wittelsbach" (1796-97) and Meier's "Wolfred von Dromberg" (1797) were never permitted to see the light. His second publication (February, 1799) was a free translation of Goethe's tragedy, "Gotz von Berlichingen mit der Eisernen Hand." The original was a most influential work in Germany. It had been already twenty-six years before the public and had produced countless imitations, with some of which Scott had been busy before he encountered this, the fountain head of the whole flood of _Ritterschauspiele_.[28] Gotz was an historical character, a robber knight of Franconia in the fifteenth century, who had championed the rights of the free knights to carry on private warfare and had been put under the ban of the empire for engaging in feuds. "It would be difficult," wrote Carlyle, "to name two books which have exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature of Europe"--than "The Sorrows of Werther" and "Gotz." "The fortune of 'Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,' though less sudden"--than Werther's--"was by no means less exalted. In his own country 'Gotz,'

though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made noise enough in their day and generation; and with ourselves his influence has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's first literary enterprise was a translation of 'Gotz von Berlichingen'; and if genius could be communicated, like instruction, we might call this work of Goethe's the prime cause of 'Marmion' and 'The Lady of the Lake,'

with all that has since followed from the same creative hand. . . How far 'Gotz von Berlichingen' actually affected Scott's literary destination, and whether without it the rhymed romances, and then the prose romances of the author of Waverly, would not have followed as they did, must remain a very obscure question; obscure and not important. Of the fact, however, there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, which may be named Gotzism and Wertherism, of the former of which Scott was representative with us, have made and are still in some quarters making the tour of all Europe. In Germany, too, there was this affectionate, half-regretful looking-back into the past: Germany had its buff-belted, watch-tower period in literature, and had even got done with it before Scott began."[29]

Elsewhere Carlyle protests against the common English notion that German literature dwells "with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, specters, and banditti. . . If any man will insist on taking Heinse's 'Ardingh.e.l.lo'

and Miller's 'Siegwart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above all the everlasting Kotzebue,[30] as his specimens of German literature, he may establish many things. Black Forests and the glories of Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the specter nun and the charmed moonshine shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts and the like suspicious characters will be found in abundance. We are little read in this bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be mostly relinquished. . . What should we think of a German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,'

Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, pa.s.ses with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the ghost that walks in it."[31]

Now for the works here named, as for the whole cla.s.s of melodramas and melodramatic romances which swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of the century and made their way into English theaters and circulating libraries, in the shape of translations, adaptations, imitations, two plays were remotely responsible: Goethe's "Gotz" (1773), with its robber knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, and insurgent peasants; and Schiller's "Die Rauber" (1781), with its still more violent situations and more formidable _dramatis personae_. True, this sp.a.w.n of the _Sturm- und Drangzeit_, with its dealings in banditti, monks, inquisitors, confessionals, torture and poison, dungeon and rack, the haunted tower, the yelling ghost, and the solitary cell, had been antic.i.p.ated in England by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and "Mysterious Mother"; but this slender native stream was now quite overwhelmed in the turbid flood of sensational matter from the Black Forest and the Rhine.

Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign sources. In 1794 she made the tour of the Rhine and published a narrative of her journey in the year following. The knightly river had not yet become hackneyed; Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung the seductive charms of the Lurlei; nor Byron mused upon "the castled crag of Drachenfels." The French armies were not far off, and there were alarums and excursions all along the border. But the fair traveler paused upon many a spot already sacred to legend and song: the Mouse Tower and Rolandseck and the Seven Mountains. She noted the peasants, in their picturesque costumes, carrying baskets of soil to the steep vineyard terraces: the ruined keeps of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep of the romantic valleys, bringing in their tributary streams from north and south.

Lockhart says that Scott's translations of "Gotz" should have been published ten years sooner to have had its full effect. For the English public had already become sated with the melodramas and romances of Kotzebue and the other German _Kraftmanner_; and the clever parody of "The Robbers," under the t.i.tle of "The Rovers," which Canning and Ellis had published in the _Anti-Jacobin_, had covered the entire species with ridicule. The vogue of this cla.s.s of fiction, the chivalry romance, the feudal drama, the robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and the ghost story (_Ritterstuck, Ritteroman, Rauberstuck, Rauberroman, Klostergeschichte, Gespensterlied_) both in Germany and England, satisfied, however crudely, the longing of the time for freedom, adventure, strong action, and emotion. As Lowell said of the transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to get at the fresh air. Laughable as many of them seem today, with their improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement, and their unimpa.s.sioned strain of reflection and description. They appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of the _Naturton_, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic emotions, pity and terror. This spirit infected not merely the department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction in general. It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like Beckford's "Vathek," G.o.dwin's "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams," Mrs.

Sh.e.l.ley's "Frankenstein," Sh.e.l.ley's "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvine the Rosicrucian," and the American Charles Brockden Brown's "Ormond" and "Wieland," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the _elixir vitae_, or who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying their burning hearts in their hands.

Lockhart, however, denies that "Gotz von Berlichingen" had anything in common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the _Anti-Jacobin_. He says that it was a "broad, bold, free, and most picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events." He thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with "their forays upon each other's domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord,"

Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy's "Reliques" prompted the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so "Gotz"

prompted the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion." He quotes the pa.s.sage from "Gotz" where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader the further progress of the battle; and he asks "who does not recognize in Goethe's drama the true original of the death scene in 'Marmion' and the storm in 'Ivanhoe'?"

A singular figure now comes upon our stage, Matthew Gregory Lewis, commonly nicknamed "Monk" Lewis, from the t.i.tle of his famous romance.

It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter Scott's should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like Lewis. His "Monk" had been published in 1795, when the author was only twenty. In 1798 Scott's friend William Erskine meet Lewis in London.

The latter was collecting materials for his "Tales of Wonder," and when Erskine showed him Scott's "William and Helen" and "The Wild Huntsman,"

and told him that he had other things of the kind in ma.n.u.script, 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 a.s.siduous 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 Parna.s.sus a churchyard; Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow; Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's s.e.xton 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 s.p.a.ce with Byron and Sh.e.l.ley in their Swiss retreat and set the whole company composing goblin stories. The most remarkable outcome of this queer symposium was Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's abnormal romance, "Frankenstein." The signatures of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil to Lewis' will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison Diodati, Geneva; a somewhat rhetorical doc.u.ment 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."