Lewis was of extremely diminutive stature. "I remember a picture of him," says Scott, "by Saunders, being handed round at Dalkeith House. The artist had ingeniously flung a dark folding mantle around his form, under which was half hid a dagger, a dark-lantern, or some such cut-throat appurtenance. With all this the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat. Lewis! why, that picture's like _a man_!' He looked, and lo! Mat. Lewis was at his elbow. This boyishness went through life with him. He was a child, and a spoiled child--but a child of high imagination, and he wasted himself on ghost-stories and German romances. He had the finest ear for the rhythm of verse I ever met with--finer than Byron's." The death of Lewis's father made the poet a man of independent fortune. He succeeded to considerable plantations in the West Indies, besides a large sum of money; and in order to ascertain personally the condition of the slaves on his estate, he sailed for the West Indies in 1815. Of this voyage he wrote a narrative, which was published many years after, under the title of the _Journal of a West India Proprietor_. The manner in which the negroes received him on his arrival amongst them, he thus describes:--"As soon as the carriage entered my gates, the uproar and confusion which ensued sets all description at defiance; the works were instantly all abandoned, everything that had life came flocking to the house from all quarters, and not only the men, and the women, and the children, but 'by a bland assimilation,' the hogs, and the dogs, and the geese, and the fowls, and the turkeys, all came hurrying along by instinct, to see what could possibly be the matter, and seemed to be afraid of arriving too late. Whether the pleasure of the negroes was sincere may be doubted, but certainly it was the loudest that I ever witnessed. They all talked together, sang, danced, shouted, and in the violence of their gesticulations, tumbled over each other and rolled about on the ground. Twenty voices at once inquired after uncles and aunts, and grandfathers and great-grandmothers of mine, who had been buried long before I was in existence, and whom, I verily believe, most of them knew only by tradition. One woman held up her little naked black child to me, grinning from ear to ear: 'Look, massa! look here! him nice lily neger for massa!' Another complained--'So long since come see we, massa; good massa come at last.' As for the old people, they were all in one and the same story; now they had lived once to see massa, they were ready for dying to-morrow--'them no care.'