Feb. 22nd, 1831.

Dear Dyer,—­Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Rogers’s friends, are perfectly assured, that you never intended any harm by an innocent couplet, and that in the revivification of it by blundering Barker you had no hand whatever.  To imagine that, at this time of day, Rogers broods over a fantastic expression of more than thirty years’ standing, would be to suppose him indulging his “Pleasures of Memory” with a vengeance.  You never penned a line which for its own sake you need (dying) wish to blot.  You mistake your heart if you think you can write a lampoon.  Your whips are rods of roses.  Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the vicious-abstract offences, not the concrete sinner.  But you are sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a compliment, as another man would at the perpetration of an affront.  But do not lug me into the same soreness of conscience with yourself.  I maintain, and will to the last hour, that I never writ of you but con amore.  That if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was not for the purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with scholar-like habits:  for is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat near of sight, before age naturally brings on the malady?  You could not then plead the obrepens senectus.  Did I not moreover make it an apology for a certain absence, which some of your friends may have experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a casual street-meeting, and did I not strengthen your excuse for this slowness of recognition, by further accounting morally for the present engagement of your mind in worthy objects?  Did I not, in your person, make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever made?  If these things be not so, I never knew what I wrote or meant by my writing, and have been penning libels all my life without being aware of it.  Does it follow that I should have exprest myself exactly in the same way of those dear old eyes of yours now—­now that Father Time has conspired with a hard task-master to put a last extinguisher upon them?  I should as soon have insulted the Answerer of Salmasius, when he awoke up from his ended task, and saw no more with mortal vision.  But you are many films removed yet from Milton’s calamity.  You write perfectly intelligibly.  Marry, the letters are not all of the same size or tallness; but that only shows your proficiency in the hands—­text, german-hand, court-hand, sometimes law-hand, and affords variety.  You pen better than you did a twelvemonth ago; and if you continue to improve, you bid fair to win the golden pen which is the prize at your young gentlemen’s academy.  But you must beware of Valpy, and his printing-house, that hazy cave of Trophonius, out of which it was a mercy that you escaped with a glimmer.  Beware of MSS. and Variae Lectiones.  Settle the text for once in your mind, and stick to it.  You have some years’ good sight in you yet, if you do not tamper with it.  It is not for you (for us I should say) to go poring into Greek contractions, and star-gazing upon slim Hebrew points.  We have yet the sight