"Of this remarkable young man, Charles Skinner Matthews," says Moore, "I have already had occasion to speak; but the high station which he held in Lord Byron's affection and admiration may justify a somewhat ampler tribute to his memory.
"There have seldom, perhaps, started together in life so many youths of high promise and hope as were to be found among the society of which Lord Byron formed a part at Cambridge. Among all these young men of learning and talent, the superiority in almost every department of intellect seems to have been, by the ready consent of all, awarded to Matthews.... Young Matthews appears—in spite of some little asperities of temper and manner, which he was already beginning to soften down when snatched away—to have been one of those rare individuals who, while they command deference, can at the same time win regard, and who, as it were, relieve the intense feeling of admiration which they excite by blending it with love."
Matthews died while bathing in the Cam.
On the 7th of September, 1811, Byron wrote to Dallas as follows:—"Matthews, Hobhouse, Davies, and myself, formed a coterie of our own at Cambridge and elsewhere.... Davies, who is not a scribbler, has always beaten us all in the war of words. H—— and myself always had the worst of it with the other two, and even M—— yielded to the dashing vivacity of S. D——."
And in another letter:—"You did not know M——: he was a man of the most astonishing powers."
And again, speaking of his death to Mr. Hodgson, he writes:—
"You will feel for poor Hobhouse; Matthews was the god of his idolatry: and if intellect could exalt a man above his fellows, no one would refuse him pre-eminence."
Matthews died at the time when he was offering himself to compete for a lucrative and honorable position in the University. As soon as his death was known, it was said that if the highest talents could be sure of success, if the strictest principles of honor, and the devotion to him of a multitude of friends could have assured it, his dream would have been realized.
Besides a great superiority of intellect, Matthews was gifted with a very amusing originality of thought, which, joined to a very keen sense of the ridiculous, exercised a kind of irresistible fascination. Lord Byron, who loved a joke better than any one, took great pleasure in all the amusing eccentricities of him who was styled the Dean of Newstead; while Byron had been christened by him the Abbot of that place.
Shortly before his death, in 1821, Byron wrote a very amusing letter from Ravenna to Murray, recalling a host of anecdotes relating to Matthews, and which well set forth the clever eccentricity of the man for whom Byron professed so much esteem and admiration.