I was shocked with the sudden certainty which could not be mistaken—­his countenance in a few minutes became nearly black.  I should have attributed so rapid a change to poison, had I not been aware that he had no opportunity of receiving it unperceived.  The day was declining, the body was rapidly altering, and nothing remained but to fulfil his request.  With the aid of Suleiman’s ataghan and my own sabre, we scooped a shallow grave upon the spot which Darvell had indicated:  the earth easily gave way, having already received some Mahometan tenant.  We dug as deeply as the time permitted us, and throwing the dry earth upon all that remained of the singular being so lately departed, we cut a few sods of greener turf from the less withered soil around us, and laid them upon his sepulchre.

Between astonishment and grief, I was tearless.

* * * * *

LETTER

TO JOHN MURRAY, ESQ.  ON THE REV.  W.L.  BOWLES’S STRICTURES ON THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF POPE.

* * * * *

    “I’ll play at Bowls with the sun and moon.”—­OLD SONG.

    “My mither’s auld, Sir, and she has rather forgotten hersel in
    speaking to my Leddy, that canna weel bide to be contradickit,
    (as I ken nobody likes it, if they could help themsels.)”

    TALES OF MY LANDLORD, Old Mortality, vol. ii. p. 163.

* * * * *

Ravenna, February 7. 1821.

Dear Sir,

In the different pamphlets which you have had the goodness to send me, on the Pope and Bowles’ controversy, I perceive that my name is occasionally introduced by both parties.  Mr. Bowles refers more than once to what he is pleased to consider “a remarkable circumstance,” not only in his letter to Mr. Campbell, but in his reply to the Quarterly.  The Quarterly also and Mr. Gilchrist have conferred on me the dangerous honour of a quotation; and Mr. Bowles indirectly makes a kind of appeal to me personally, by saying, “Lord Byron, if he remembers the circumstance, will witness”—­(witness IN ITALICS, an ominous character for a testimony at present).

I shall not avail myself of a “non mi ricordo,” even after so long a residence in Italy;—­I do “remember the circumstance,”—­and have no reluctance to relate it (since called upon so to do), as correctly as the distance of time and the impression of intervening events will permit me.  In the year 1812, more than three years after the publication of “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” I had the honour of meeting Mr. Bowles in the house of our venerable host of “Human Life,” &c. the last Argonaut of classic English poetry, and the Nestor of our inferior race of living poets.  Mr. Bowles calls this “soon after” the publication; but to me three years appear a considerable segment of the immortality of a modern poem.  I