Note 11 — NOVEMBER.

Sir Walter told Moore that Lewis was the person who first set him upon trying his talent at poetry, adding that "he had passed the early part of his life with a set of clever, rattling, drinking fellows, whose thoughts and talents lay wholly out of the region of poetry." Thirty years after having met Lewis in Edinburgh for the first time in 1798, he said to Allan Cunningham, "that he thought he had never felt such elation as when 'the monk' invited him to dine with him at his hotel." Lewis died in 1818, and Scott says of him, "He did much good by stealth, and was a most generous creature—fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or as a man of fashion. He had always ladies and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of any one that had a title. Mat had queerish eyes—they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit."