Committee candidates. Seriously, I think you have a chance of something much better; for prologuising is not my forte, and, at all events, either my pride or my modesty won't let me incur the hazard of having my rhymes buried in next month's Magazine, under 'Essays on the Murder of Mr. Perceval,' and 'Cures for the Bite of a Mad Dog,' as poor Goldsmith complained of the fate of far superior performances.*

"I am still sufficiently interested to wish to know the successful candidate; and, amongst so many, I have no doubt some will be excellent, particularly in an age when writing verse is the easiest of all attainments.

"I cannot answer your intelligence with the 'like comfort,' unless, as you are deeply theatrical, you may wish to hear of Mr. - [Betty], whose acting is, I fear, utterly inadequate to the London engagement into which the managers of Covent Garden have lately entered. His figure is fat, his features flat, his voice unmanageable, his action ungraceful, and, as Diggoryt says, 'I defy him to extort that d-d muffin face of his into madness.' I was very sorry to see him in the character of the 'Elephant on the slack rope;' for, when I last saw him, I was in raptures with his performance. But then I was sixteen-an age to which all London condescended to subside. After all, much better judges have admired, and may again; but I venture to 'prognosticate a prophecy' (see the Courier), that he will not succeed.

"So, poor dear Rogers has stuck fast on 'the brow of the mighty Helvellyn'-I hope not for ever. My best respects to Lady H.:-her departure, with that of my other friends, was a sad event for me, now reduced to a state of the most cynical solitude. 'By the waters of Cheltenham I sat down and drank, when I remembered thee,

* "The public were more importantly employed than to observe the easy simplicity of my style, or the harmony of my periods. Sheet after sheet was thrown off to oblivion. My essays were buried among the essays upon liberty, eastern tales, and cures for the bite of a mad dog."-Goldsmith's Misc. Works, vol. ii. p. 105, ed. 1837.

+ In the farce of "All the World's a Stage."

oh Georgiana Cottage! As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the willows that grew thereby. Then they said, Sing us a song of Drury Lane,' etc. ;- but I am dumb and dreary as the Israelites. The waters have disordered me to my heart's content you were right, as you always are. "Believe me, ever your obliged and affectionate servant, "BYRON."

TO MR. MOORE.

"4 Benedictine Street, St. James's, July 8, 1813. "I presume by your silence that I have blundered into something noxious in my reply to your letter, for the which I beg leave to send beforehand a sweeping apology, which you may apply to any, or all, parts of that unfortunate epistle. If I err in my conjecture, I expect the like from you, in putting our correspondence so long in quarantine. God he knows what I have said; but he also knows (if he is not as indifferent to mortals as the nonchalant deities of Lucretius), that you are the last person I want to offend. So, if I have, why the devil don't you say it at once, and expectorate your spleen?

"Rogers is out of town with Madame de Stael, who hath published an Essay against Suicide, which, I presume, will make somebody shoot himself; - as a sermon by Blinkensop, in proof of Christianity, sent a hitherto most orthodox acquaintance of mine out of a chapel of ease a perfect atheist. Have you found or founded a residence yet? and have you begun or finished a poem? If you won't tell me what I have done, pray say what

* "Madame de Stael treats me as the person whom she most delights to honour; I am generally ordered with her to dinner, as one orders beans and bacon: she is one of the few persons who surpass expectation; she has every sort of talent, and would be universally popular, if, in society, she were to confine herself to her inferior talentspleasantry, anecdote, and literature. I have reviewed her Essay on Suicide in the last Edinburgh Review: it is not one of her best, and I have accordingly said more of the author and the subject than of the work."-SIR J. MACKINTOSH: Life, vol. ii. p. 264.

you have done, or left undone, yourself. I am still in equipment for voyaging, and anxious to hear from, or of, you before I go, which anxiety you should remove more readily, as you think I sha'n't cogitate about you afterwards. I shall give the lie to that calumny by fifty foreign letters, particularly from any place where the plague is rife, -without a drop of vinegar or a whiff of sulphur to save you from infection.

"The Oxfords have sailed almost a fortnight, and my sister is in town, which is a great comfort, for, never having been much together, we are naturally more attached to each other. I presume the illuminations have conflagrated to Derby (or wherever you are) by this time. We are just recovering from tumult and train oil, and transparent fripperies, and all the noise and nonsense of victory. Drury Lane had a large M. W., which some thought was Marshal Wellington; others, that it might be translated into Manager Whitbread; while the ladies of the vicinity of the saloon conceived the last letter to be complimentary to themselves. I leave this to the commentators to illustrate. If you don't answer this, I sha'n't say what you deserve, but I think I deserve a reply. Do you conceive there is no Post-Bag but the Twopenny? Sunburn me, if you are not too bad."

TO MR. MOORE.

July 13, 1813.

"Your letter set me at ease; for I really thought (as I hear of your susceptibility) that I had said-I know not what-but something I should have been very sorry for, had it, or I, offended you; - though I don't see how a man with a beautiful wife his own children, -quiet-famecompetency and friends (I will vouch for a thousand, which is more than I will for a unit in my own behalf), can be offended with anything.

"Do you know, Moore, I am amazingly inclinedremember I say but inclined to be seriously enamoured with Lady A. F. - but this ... has ruined all my prospects. However, you know her; is she clever, or sensible, or goodtempered? either would do-I scratch out the will. I don't ask as to her beauty-that I see; but my circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman, had I a chance. I do not yet know her much, but better than I did.

"I want to get away, but find difficulty in compassing a passage in a ship of war. They had better let me go; if I cannot, patriotism is the word 'nay, an' they'll mouth, I'll rant as well as they.' Now, what are you doing?-writing, we all hope, for our own sakes. Remember you must edit my posthumous works, with a life of the Author, for which I will send you Confessions, dated, 'Lazaretto,' Smyrna, Malta, or Palermo-one can die anywhere.

"There is to be a thing on Tuesday ycleped a national fète. The Regent and - are to be there, and everybody else, who has shillings enough for what was once a guinea. Vauxhall is the scene - there are six tickets issued for the modest women, and it is supposed there will be three to spare. The passports for the lax are beyond my arithmetic. "P.S.-The Stael last night attacked me most furiously -said that I had 'no right to make love that I had used

barbarously-that I had no feeling, and was totally insensible to la belle passion, and had been all my life.' I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before. Let me hear from you anon."

TO MR. MOORE.

"Bennet Street, August 22, 1813.

"As our late-I might say, deceased-correspondence had too much of the town-life leaven in it, we will now, 'paulo majora,' prattle a little of literature in all its branches; and first of the first-criticism. The Prince is at Brighton, and Jackson, the boxer, gone to Margate, having, I believe, decoyed Yarmouth to see a milling in that polite neighbourhood. Made. de Stael Holstein has lost one of her young barons, who has been carbonadoed by a vile Teutonic adjutant, -kilt and killed in a coffee-house at Scrawsenhawsen. Corinne is, of course, what all mothers must be, but will, I venture to prophesy, do what few mothers could-write an Essay upon it. She cannot exist without a grievance-and somebody to see, or read, how much grief becomes her. I have not seen her since the event; but merely judge (not very charitably) from prior observation.

"In a 'mail-coach copy' of the Edinburgh, I perceive The Giaour is second article. The numbers are still in the Leith smack-pray which way is the wind? The said article is so very mild and sentimental, that it must be written by Jeffrey in love, you know he is gone to America to marry some fair one, of whom he has been, for several quarters, éperdument amoureux.* Seriously-as Winifred Jenkins says of Lismahago-Mr. Jeffrey (or his deputy) 'has done the handsome thing by me,' and I say nothing. But this I will say, if you and I had knocked one another on the head in this quarrel, how he would have laughed, and what a mighty bad figure we should have cut in our posthumous works. By-the-bye, I was call'd in the other day to mediate between two gentlemen bent upon carnage, and, after a long struggle between the natural desire of destroying one's fellow-creatures, and the dislike of seeing men play the fool for nothing, -I got one to make an apology, and the other to take it, and left them to live happy ever after. One was a peer, the other a friend untitled, and both fond of high play; and one, I can swear for, though very mild, 'not fearful,' and so dead a shot, that, though the other is the thinnest of men, he would have split him like a cane. They both conducted themselves very well, and I put them out of pain as soon as I could.

* Mr. Jeffrey married, in 1814, Miss Wilkes, the daughter of Mr. Wilkes of New York, and grand-niece of the famous John Wilkes.