moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy's
"Reliques" prompted the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so "Götz"
prompted the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion." He quotes the
passage from "Götz" 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 title 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 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 _protégé_:
"they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the
orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish--he was indeed the