[Footnote 73:  The MS. was in the handwriting of Lady Byron.]

[Footnote 74:  These allusions to “a speech” are connected with a little incident, not worth mentioning, which had amused us both when I was in town.  He was rather fond (and had been always so, as may be seen in his early letters,) of thus harping on some conventional phrase or joke.]

* * * * *

LETTER 217.  TO MR. MOORE.

     “March 8. 1815.

“An event—­the death of poor Dorset—­and the recollection of what I once felt, and ought to have felt now, but could not—­set me pondering, and finally into the train of thought which you have in your hands.  I am very glad you like them, for I flatter myself they will pass as an imitation of your style.  If I could imitate it well, I should have no great ambition of originality—­I wish I could make you exclaim with Dennis, ‘That’s my thunder, by G——­d!’ I wrote them with a view to your setting them, and as a present to Power, if he would accept the words, and you did not think yourself degraded, for once in a way, by marrying them to music.

“Sun-burn N * *!—­why do you always twit me with his vile Ebrew nasalities?  Have I not told you it was all K.’s doing, and my own exquisite facility of temper?  But thou wilt be a wag, Thomas; and see what you get for it.  Now for my revenge.

“Depend—­and perpend—­upon it that your opinion of * ’s poem will travel through one or other of the quintuple correspondents, till it reaches the ear, and the liver of the author.[75] Your adventure, however, is truly laughable—­but how could you be such a potatoe?  You ‘a brother’ (of the quill) too, ‘near the throne,’ to confide to a man’s _own publisher_ (who has ‘bought,’ or rather sold, ‘golden opinions’ about him) such a damnatory parenthesis!  ‘Between you and me,’ quotha—­it reminds me of a passage in the Heir at Law—­’Tete-a-tete with Lady Duberly, I suppose.’—­’No—­tete-a-tete with _five hundred people_;’ and your confidential communication will doubtless be in circulation to that amount, in a short time, with several additions, and in several letters, all signed L.H.R.O.B., &c. &c. &c.

     “We leave this place to-morrow, and shall stop on our way to town
     (in the interval of taking a house there) at Col.  Leigh’s, near
     Newmarket, where any epistle of yours will find its welcome way.

“I have been very comfortable here,—­listening to that d——­d monologue, which elderly gentlemen call conversation, and in which my pious father-in-law repeats himself every evening—­save one, when he played upon the fiddle.  However, they have been very kind and hospitable, and I like them and the place vastly, and I hope they will live many happy months.  Bell is in health, and unvaried good-humour and behaviour.  But we are all