and me (if they and we live so long) will be that the Miss Moores and Miss Byrons will present us with a great variety of grandchildren by different fathers.

     “Pray, where did you get hold of Goethe’s Florentine
     husband-killing story?  Upon such matters, in general, I may say,
     with Beau Clincher, in reply to Errand’s wife—­

     “‘Oh the villain, he hath murdered my poor Timothy!’

     “’Clincher.  Damn your Timothy!—­I tell you, woman, your husband
     has murdered me—­he has carried away my fine jubilee clothes.’

“So Bowles has been telling a story, too (’tis in the Quarterly), about the woods of ‘Madeira,’ and so forth.  I shall be at Bowles again, if he is not quiet.  He mis-states, or mistakes, in a point or two.  The paper is finished, and so is the letter.

     “Yours,” &c.

* * * * *

LETTER 393.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, 9bre 9 deg., 1820.

“The talent you approve of is an amiable one, and might prove a ‘national service,’ but unfortunately I must be angry with a man before I draw his real portrait; and I can’t deal in ‘generals,’ so that I trust never to have provocation enough to make a Gallery.  If ‘the parson’ had not by many little dirty sneaking traits provoked it, I should have been silent, though I had observed him.  Here follows an alteration:  put—­

        Devil with such delight in damning,
        That if at the resurrection
        Unto him the free election
        Of his future could be given,
        ’Twould be rather Hell than Heaven;

that is to say, if these two new lines do not too much lengthen out and weaken the amiability of the original thought and expression.  You have a discretionary power about showing.  I should think that Croker would not disrelish a sight of these light little humorous things, and may be indulged now and then.

“Why, I do like one or two vices, to be sure; but I can back a horse and fire a pistol ‘without thinking or blinking’ like Major Sturgeon; I have fed at times for two months together on sheer biscuit and water (without metaphor); I can get over seventy or eighty miles a day riding post, and swim five at a stretch, as at Venice, in 1818, or at least I could do, and have done it ONCE.

“I know Henry Matthews:  he is the image, to the very voice, of his brother Charles, only darker—­his laugh his in particular.  The first time I ever met him was in Scrope Davies’s rooms after his brother’s death, and I nearly dropped, thinking that it was his ghost.  I have also dined with him in his rooms at King’s College.  Hobhouse once purposed a similar Memoir; but I am afraid that the letters of Charles’s