[Footnote 4:  I certainly ventured to differ from the judgment of my noble friend, no less in his attempts to depreciate that peculiar walk of the art in which he himself so grandly trod, than in the inconsistency of which I thought him guilty, in condemning all those who stood up for particular “schools” of poetry, and yet, at the same time, maintaining so exclusive a theory of the art himself.  How little, however, he attended to either the grounds or degrees of my dissent from him, will appear by the following wholesale report of my opinion, in his “Detached Thoughts:” 

“One of my notions different from those of my contemporaries, is, that the present is not a high age of English poetry.  There are more poets (soi-disant) than ever there were, and proportionally less poetry.

“This thesis I have maintained for some years, but, strange to say, it meeteth not with favour from my brethren of the shell.  Even Moore shakes his head, and firmly believes that it is the grand age of British poesy.”]

[Footnote 5:  Written by Lord Byron’s early friend, the Rev. Francis Hodgson.]

[Footnote 6:  The strange verses that follow are from a poem by Keats.—­In a manuscript note on this passage of the pamphlet, dated November 12. 1821, Lord Byron says, “Mr. Keats died at Rome about a year after this was written, of a decline produced by his having burst a blood-vessel on reading the article on his ‘Endymion’ in the Quarterly Review.  I have read the article before and since; and, although it is bitter, I do not think that a man should permit himself to be killed by it.  But a young man little dreams what he must inevitably encounter in the course of a life ambitious of public notice.  My indignation at Mr. Keats’s depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which, malgre all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise.  His fragment of ‘Hyperion’ seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus.  He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language.”]

[Footnote 7:  “It was at least a grammar ‘school.’”]

[Footnote 8:  “So spelt by the author.”]

* * * * *

LETTER 396.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, 9bre 4. 1820.

“I have received from Mr. Galignani the enclosed letters, duplicates and receipts, which will explain themselves.[9] As the poems are your property by purchase, right, and justice, all matters of publication, &c. &c. are for you to decide upon.  I know not how far my compliance with Mr. Galignani’s request might be legal, and I doubt that it would not be honest.  In case you choose to arrange with him, I enclose