with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end.  Were I to try, I could make nothing of any other subject, and that I have apparently exhausted.  ‘Wo to him,’ says Voltaire, ’who says all he could say on any subject.’  There are some on which, perhaps, I could have said still more:  but I leave them all, and too soon.

“Do you remember the lines I sent you early last year, which you still have?  I don’t wish (like Mr. Fitzgerald, in the Morning Post) to claim the character of ‘Vates’ in all its translations, but were they not a little prophetic?  I mean those beginning, ’There’s not a joy the world can,’ &c. &c., on which I rather pique myself as being the truest, though the most melancholy, I ever wrote.

“What a scrawl have I sent you!  You say nothing of yourself, except that you are a Lancasterian churchwarden, and an encourager of mendicants.  When are you out? and how is your family?  My child is very well and flourishing, I hear; but I must see also.  I feel no disposition to resign it to the contagion of its grandmother’s society, though I am unwilling to take it from the mother.  It is weaned, however, and something about it must be decided.  Ever,” &c.

[Footnote 92:  This sad doubt,—­“if I am at all,”—­becomes no less singular than sad when we recollect that six and thirty was actually the age when he ceased to “be,” and at a moment, too, when (as even the least friendly to him allow) he was in that state of “progressing merits” which he here jestingly anticipates.]

* * * * *

Having already gone so far in laying open to my readers some of the sentiments which I entertained, respecting Lord Byron’s marriage, at a time when, little foreseeing that I should ever become his biographer, I was, of course, uninfluenced by the peculiar bias supposed to belong to that task, it may still further, perhaps, be permitted me to extract from my reply to the foregoing letter some sentences of explanation which its contents seemed to me to require.

“I had certainly no right to say any thing about the unluckiness of your choice, though I rejoice now that I did, as it has drawn from you a tribute which, however unaccountable and mysterious it renders the whole affair, is highly honourable to both parties.  What I meant in hinting a doubt with respect to the object of your selection did not imply the least impeachment of that perfect amiableness which the world, I find, by common consent, allows to her.  I only feared that she might have been too perfect—­too precisely excellent—­too matter-of-fact a paragon for you to coalesce with comfortably; and that a person whose perfection hung in more easy folds about her, whose brightness was softened down by some of ‘those fair defects which best conciliate love,’ would, by appealing more dependently to your protection, have stood a much better chance with your good nature.  All these suppositions,