the following paragraph in a newspaper. « Lady Byron is this year the lady patroness at the annual Charity Ball given at the Town Hall at Hinckly, Leicestershire, and Sir G. Crewe, Bart. the principal steward."> These verses are full of strong and indignant feeling,-every stanza concluding pointedly with the words « Charity Ball,»—and the thought that predominates through · the whole may be collected from a few of the opening lines : What matter the pangs of a husband and father, What matters-a heart, which though faulty was feeling, LETTER CCCCLX. " TO MR MOORE. September-no-October 1, 1821. << I have written to you lately, both in prose and verse, at great length, to Paris and London. I presume that Mrs Moore, or whoever is your Paris deputy, will forward my packets to you in London. << I am setting off for Pisa, if a slight incipient intermittent fever do not prevent me. I fear it is not strong enough to give Murray much chance of realizing his thirteens again. I hardly should regret it, I think, provided you raised your price upon him—as what Lady Holderness (my sister's grandmother, a Dutchwoman) used to call Augusta, her Residee Legatoo--so as to pro 200 NOTICES OF THE A. D. 1821. vide for us all; my bones with a splendid and larmoyante edition, and you with double what is extractable during my lifetime. "I have a strong presentiment that (bating some out of the way accident) you will survive me. The difference of eight years, or whatever it is, between our ages, is nothing. I do not feel (nor am, indeed, anxious to feel) the principle of life in me tend to longevity. My father and mother died, the one at thirty-five or six, and the other at forty-five; and Doctor Rush, or somebody else, says that nobody lives long, without having one parent, at least, an old stager. « I should, to be sure, like to see out my eternal mother-in-law, not so much for her heritage, but from my natural antipathy. But the indulgence of this natural desire is too much to expect from the Providence who presides over old women. about lives, because it has been put in my way by a I bore you with all this calculation of insurances which Murray has sent me. I really think you should have more, if I evaporate within a reasonable time. « I wonder if my ' Cain' has got safe to England. I have written since about sixty stanzas of a poem, in octave stanzas (in the Pulci style, which the fools in England think was invented by Whistlecraft—it is as old as the hills in Italy) called 'The Vision of Judgment, by Quevedo Redivivus,' with this motto A Daniel come to judgment, yea, a Daniel : I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word. « In this it is my intent to put the said George's Apotheosis in a Whig point of view, not forgetting the Poet Laureate for his preface and his other demerits. « I am just got to the pass where Saint Peter, hearing that the royal defunct had opposed Catholic Emancipation, rises up and, interrupting Satan's oration, declares he will change places with Cerberus sooner than let him into heaven, while he has the keys thereof. « I must go and ride, though rather feverish and chilly. It is the ague season; but the agues do me rather good than harm. The feel after the fit is as if one had got rid of one's body for good and all. « The gods go with you!—Address to Pisa. « Ever yours. « P.S.—Since I came back I feel better, though I staid out too late for this malaria season, under the thin crescent of a very young moon, and got off my horse to walk in an avenue with a Signora for an hour. I thought of you and When at eve thou rovest But it was not in a romantic mood, as I should have been once; and yet it was a new woman (that is, new to me), and, of course, expected to be made love to. But I merely made a few common-place speeches. I feel as your poor friend Curran said, before his death, ‘a mountain of lead upon my heart,' which I believe to be constitutional, and that nothing will remove it but the same remedy.» LETTER CCCCLXI. TO MR MOORE. « October 6th, 1821. "By this post I have sent my nightmare to balance the incubus of ***'s impudent anticipation of the Apo theosis of George the Third. I should-like you to take a look over it, as I think there are two or three things in it which might please 'our puir hill folk.' << By the last two or three posts I have written to you at length. My ague bows to me every two or three days, but we are not as yet upon intimate speaking terms. I have an intermittent generally every two years, when the climate is favourable (as it is here), but it does me no harm. What I find worse, and cannot get rid of, is the growing depression of my spirits, without sufficient cause. I ride-I am not intemperate in eating or drinking-and my general health is as usual, except a slight ague, which rather does good than not. It must be constitutional; for I know nothing more than usual to depress me to that degree. How do you manage? I think you told me, at Venice, that your spirits did not keep up without a little claret. I can drink, and bear a good deal of wine (as you may recollect in England); but it don't exhilarate -it makes me savage and suspicious, and even quarrelsome. Laudanum has a similar effect; but I can take much of it without any effect at all. The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a dose of salts—I mean in the afternoon, after their effect. But one can't take them like champagne. It was, no doubt, from a similar experience of its effects that Dryden always took physic, when about to write any thing of importance. His caricature, Bayes, is accordingly made to say, « When I have a grand design, I ever take physic and let blood; for, when you would have pure swiftness of thought and fiery flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part;—in short, » etc. etc. On this subject of the effects of medicine upon the mind and spirits, some curious facts and illustrations have been, with his usual research, collected by Mr d'Israeli, in his amusing « Curiosities of Literature.» « Excuse this old woman's letter; but my lemancholy don't depend upon health, for it is just the same, well or ill, or here or there. << Yours, etc.>> LETTER CCCCLXII. TO MR MURRAY. « Ravenna, October 9th, 1821. « You will please to present or convey the enclosed poem to Mr Moore. I sent him another copy to Paris; but he has probably left that city. « Don't forget to send me my first act of 'Werner' (if Hobhouse can find it amongst my papers)-send it by the post (to Pisa); and also cut out Sophia Lee's 'German's Tale' from the 'Canterbury Tales,' and send it in a letter also. I began that tragedy in 1815. « By the way, you have a good deal of my prose tracts in MS.? Let me have proofs of them all again. I mean the controversial ones, including the last two or three years of time. Another question!-The Epistle of St Paul, which I translated from the Armenian, for what reason have you kept it back, though you published that stuff which gave rise to the 'Vampire?" Is it because you are afraid to print any thing in opposition to the cant of the Quarterly about Manicheism? Let me have a proof of that Epistle directly. I am a better Christian than those parsons of yours, though not paid for being so. « Send-Faber's Treatise on the Cabiri. « Sainte Croix's Mystères du Paganisme (scarce, perhaps, but to be found, as Mitford refers to his work frequently). |