“Ever, &c.

     “P.S.  My best remembrances to Mr. Gifford.  Pray say all that can be
     said from me to him.

“I am sorry that Mr. Maturin did not like Phillips’s picture.  I thought it was reckoned a good one.  If he had made the speech on the original, perhaps he would have been more readily forgiven by the proprietor and the painter of the portrait * * *.”

[Footnote 110:  A Monody on the death of Sheridan, which was spoken at Drury Lane theatre.]

* * * * *

LETTER 246.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Diodati, Sept. 30. 1816.

     “I answered your obliging letters yesterday:  to-day the Monody
     arrived with its title-page, which is, I presume, a separate
     publication.  ’The request of a friend:’—­

        ‘Obliged by hunger and request of friends.’

I will request you to expunge that same, unless you please to add, ‘by a person of quality,’ or ‘of wit and honour about town.’  Merely say, ‘written to be spoken at Drury Lane.’  To-morrow I dine at Copet.  Saturday I strike tents for Italy.  This evening, on the lake in my boat with Mr. Hobhouse, the pole which sustains the mainsail slipped in tacking, and struck me so violently on one of my legs (the worst, luckily) as to make me do a foolish thing, viz. to faint—­a downright swoon; the thing must have jarred some nerve or other, for the bone is not injured, and hardly painful (it is six hours since), and cost Mr. Hobhouse some apprehension and much sprinkling of water to recover me.  The sensation was a very odd one:  I never had but two such before, once from a cut on the head from a stone, several years ago, and once (long ago also) in falling into a great wreath of snow;—­a sort of grey giddiness first, then nothingness, and a total loss of memory on beginning to recover.  The last part is not disagreeable, if one did not find it again.

     “You want the original MSS.  Mr. Davies has the first fair copy in
     my own hand, and I have the rough composition here, and will send
     or save it for you, since you wish it.

“With regard to your new literary project, if any thing falls in the way which will, to the best of my judgment, suit you, I will send you what I can.  At present I must lay by a little, having pretty well exhausted myself in what I have sent you.  Italy or Dalmatia and another summer may, or may not, set me off again.  I have no plans, and am nearly as indifferent what may come as where I go.  I shall take Felicia Heman’s Restoration, &c. with me; it is a good poem—­very.

     “Pray repeat my best thanks and remembrances to Mr. Gifford for all
     his trouble and good nature towards me.

     “Do not fancy me laid up, from the beginning of this scrawl.  I tell
     you the accident for want of better to say; but it is over, and I
     am only wondering what the deuce was the matter with me.