a man of the first talents, and also not the worst of my narrow circle, has perished miserably in the muddy waves of the Cam, always fatal to genius :-my poor schoolfellow, Wingfield, at Coimbra-within a month ; and whilst I had heard from all three, but not seen one. Matthews wrote to me the very day before his death; and though I feel for his fate, I am still more anxious for Hobhouse, who, I very much fear, will hardly retain his senses: his letters to me since the event have been most incoherent. But let this pass; we shall all one day pass along with the rest-the world is too full of such things, and our very sorrow is selfish. I received a letter from you, which my late occupations prevented me from duly noticing.-I hope your friends and family will long hold together. I shall be glad to hear from you, on business, on common-place, or anything, or nothing-but death-I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation ; but the worms are less ceremonious.-Surely, the Romans did well when they burned the dead.-To Mr. Dallas. Aug. 12, 1811. Your letter gives me credit for more acute feelings than I possess; for though I feel tolerably miserable, yet I am at the same time subject to a kind of hysterical merriment, or rather laughter without merriment, which I can neither account for nor conquer, and yet I do not feel relieved by it; but an indifferent person would think me in excellent spirits. "We must forget these things," and have recourse to our old selfish comforts, or rather comfortable selfishness.-To Mr. Dallas. Aug. 21, 1811. CHARLES SKINNER MATTHEWS. 27 27 People have wondered at the melancholy which runs through my writings. Others have wondered at my personal gaiety. But I recollect once, after an hour in which I had been sincerely and particularly gay and rather brilliant, in company, my wife replying to me when I said (upon her remarking my high spirits), "And yet, Bell, I have been called and miscalled melancholy—you must have seen how falsely, frequently?"—" No, Byron,” she answered, “it is not so: at heart you are the most melancholy of mankind; and often when apparently gayest.” —Journal. CHARLES SKINNER MATTHEWS. What you said of the late Charles Skinner Matthews has set me to my recollections; but I have not been able to turn up anything 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. 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, 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. 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 Hobhouse, 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. 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. 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 visitors, and used to sit up late in our friars' dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the skull-cup,* * Lord Byron gives the following account of this cup :-" The gardener, in digging, discovered a skull that had probably belonged to some jolly friar or monk of the abbey, about the time it was demonasteried. Observing it to be of giant size, and in a perfect state of preservation, a strange fancy seized me of having it set and mounted as a drinking cup. I accordingly sent it to town, and it returned with a very high polish, and of a mottled colour like tortoiseshell." CHARLES SKINNER MATTHEWS. 29 29 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 Hobhouse out of a window, in consequence of I know not what commerce of jokes ending in this epigram. Hobhouse 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. Matthews and myself had travelled down from London together, talking all the way incessantly upon one single topic. When we got to Loughborough, I know not what chasm had made us diverge for a moment to some other subject, at which he was indignant. “Come,” said he, "don't let us break through -let us go on as we began, to our journey's end;" and so he continued, and was as entertaining as ever to the very end. He had previously occupied, during my year's absence from Cambridge, my rooms in Trinity, with the furniture; and Jones, the tutor, in his odd way, had said, on putting him in, "Mr. Matthews, I recommend to your attention not to damage any of the movables, for Lord Byron, sir, is a young man of tumultuous passions." Matthews was delighted with this, and whenever anybody came to visit him, begged them to handle the very door with caution; and used to repeat Jones's admonition in his tone and manner. There was a large mirror in the room, on which he remarked "that he thought his friends were grown uncommonly assiduous in coming to see him, but he soon discovered that they only came to see themselves." Jones's phrase of "tumultuous passions," and the whole scene, had put him into such good-humour, that I verily believe that I owed to it a portion of his good graces. When at Newstead, somebody, by accident, rubbed against one of his white silk stockings, one day before dinner; of course the gentleman apologised. "Sir," answered Matthews, "it may be all very well for you, who have a great many silk stockings, to dirty other people's; but to me, who have only this one pair, which I have put on in honour of the Abbot here, no apology can compensate for such carelessness; besides, the expense of washing." He had the same sort of droll, sardonic way about everything. A wild Irishman, named Farrell, one evening beginning to say something at a large supper at Cambridge, Matthews roared out "Silence!" and then, pointing to Farrell, cried out, in the words of the oracle, “ Orson is endowed with reason." You may easily suppose that Orson lost what reason he had acquired on hearing this compliment. When Hobhouse published his volume of poems, the Miscellany (which Matthews would call the Miss-sell any), all that could be drawn from him was, that the preface was extremely like Walsh." Hobhouse thought this at first a compliment; but we never could make out what it was, for all we know of Walsh is his Ode to King William, and Pope's epithet of "knowing Walsh." When the Newstead party broke up for London, Hobhouse and Matthews, who were the greatest friends possible, agreed, for a whim, to walk together to town. They quarrelled by the way, and actually walked the latter half of their journey, occasionally passing and repassing, without speaking. When Matthews had got to Highgate, he had spent all his |
