Another copy of verses addressed by him to the same lady, whose beauty and talent might well have claimed a warmer tribute from such a pen, is yet too interesting, as descriptive of the premature feeling of age now stealing upon him, to be omitted in these pages.

“TO THE COUNTESS OF B——.

1.

  “You have ask’d for a verse:—­the request
    In a rhymer ’twere strange to deny,
  But my Hippocrene was but my breast,
    And my feelings (its fountain) are dry.

2.

  “Were I now as I was, I had sung
    What Lawrence has painted so well;
  But the strain would expire on my tongue,
    And the theme is too soft for my shell.

3.

  “I am ashes where once I was fire,
    And the bard in my bosom is dead;
  What I loved I now merely admire,
    And my heart is as grey as my head.

4.

  “My life is not dated by years—­
    There are moments which act as a plough,
  And there is not a furrow appears
    But is deep in my soul as my brow.

5.

  “Let the young and the brilliant aspire
    To sing what I gaze on in vain;
  For sorrow has torn from my lyre
    The string which was worthy the strain.

“B.”

The following letters written during the stay of this party at Genoa will be found,—­some of them at least,—­not a little curious.

LETTER 512.  TO THE EARL OF B——.

“April 5. 1823.

“My dear Lord,

“How is your gout? or rather, how are you?  I return the Count ——­’s Journal, which is a very extraordinary production[1], and of a most melancholy truth in all that regards high life in England.  I know, or knew personally, most of the personages and societies which he describes; and after reading his remarks, have the sensation fresh upon me as if I had seen them yesterday.  I would however plead in behalf of some few exceptions, which I will mention by and by.  The most singular thing is, how he should have penetrated not the fact, but the mystery of the English ennui, at two-and-twenty.  I was about the same age when I made the same discovery, in almost precisely the same circles,—­(for there is scarcely a person mentioned whom I did not see nightly or daily, and was acquainted more or less intimately with most of them,)—­but I never could have described it so well. Il faut etre Francais, to effect this.

[Footnote 1:  In another letter to Lord B——­ he says of this gentleman, “he seems to have all the qualities requisite to have figured in his brother-in-law’s ancestor’s Memoirs.”]