Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/217

 on himself, in a Crim.-con. It seems that his conjugal felicity was not great, for, when his wife died, he came into the room where they were sitting up with the corpse, and said ‘Solder her up, solder her up!’ He saw his daughter crying, and scolded her, saying, ‘An old hag—she ought to have died thirty years ago! He married, shortly after, a young woman. He hated Hastings to a violent degree; all he hoped and prayed for was to outlive him.—But many of the newspapers of the day are written as well as Junius. Matthias’s book, ‘The Pursuits of Literature,’ now almost a dead-letter, had once a great fame.

“When Walter Scott began to write poetry, which was not at a very early age, Monk Lewis corrected his verse: he understood little then of the mechanical part of the art. The Fire King in ‘The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,’ was almost all Lewis’s. One of the ballads in that work, and, except some of Leyden’s, perhaps one of the best, was made from a story picked up in a stage-coach;—I mean that of ‘Will Jones.’