Matthew Lewis had been at Oxford with Fox's nephew, Lord Holland, and knew most of the people in that sector of the fashionable world Byron had frequented, as well as many other important figures outside it. It was therefore inevitable that he should have met Madame de Staël when she came to England, especially as he shared with her such a strong interest in German literature. Describing Lewis much later, Byron said that he was ‘a good man – a clever man – but a bore’ (‘pestilently prolix’ is a term he had used earlier to describe how boring he could be). ‘He was a Jewel of a Man,’ he went on, ‘had he been better set – I don't mean personally, but less tiresome – for he was tedious – as well as contradictory to every thing and every body.’ It was no doubt the spirit of contradiction in Lewis which helped to ensure that on one of his meetings with de Staël in England (the same at which she complained that Byron would shut his eyes during dinner), the two of them had a serious disagreement. ‘They fell out, alas!’, Byron had lamented, ‘and now they will never quarrel again. Could not one reconcile them for the “nonce”?’ It was perhaps with the idea of reconciliation that he accompanied Lewis to Coppet although, once there, he made sure he introduced a topic which he knew would set his guest ‘by the ears’ with Madame de Staël. He was quite fond of this kind of mischief-making.