“I was not alone, nor will be while I can help it.  Newstead is not yet decided.  Claughton is to make a grand effort by Saturday week to complete,—­if not, he must give up twenty-five thousand pounds and the estate, with expenses, &c. &c.  If I resume the Abbacy, you shall have due notice, and a cell set apart for your reception, with a pious welcome.  Rogers I have not seen, but Larry and Jacky came out a few days ago.  Of their effect I know nothing.

“There is something very amusing in your being an Edinburgh Reviewer.  You know, I suppose, that T * * is none of the placidest, and may possibly enact some tragedy on being told that he is only a fool.  If, now, Jeffery were to be slain on account of an article of yours, there would be a fine conclusion.  For my part, as Mrs. Winifred Jenkins says, ‘he has done the handsome thing by me,’ particularly in his last number; so, he is the best of men and the ablest of critics, and I won’t have him killed,—­though I dare say many wish he were, for being so good-humoured.

“Before I left Hastings I got in a passion with an ink bottle, which I flung out of the window one night with a vengeance;—­and what then?  Why, next morning I was horrified by seeing that it had struck, and split upon, the petticoat of Euterpe’s graven image in the garden, and grimed her as if it were on purpose[45].  Only think of my distress,—­and the epigrams that might be engendered on the Muse and her misadventure.

“I had an adventure almost as ridiculous, at some private theatricals near Cambridge—­though of a different description—­since I saw you last.  I quarrelled with a man in the dark for asking me who I was (insolently enough to be sure), and followed him into the green-room (a stable) in a rage, amongst a set of people I never saw before.  He turned out to be a low comedian, engaged to act with the amateurs, and to be a civil-spoken man enough, when he found out that nothing very pleasant was to be got by rudeness.  But you would have been amused with the row, and the dialogue, and the dress—­or rather the undress—­of the party, where I had introduced myself in a devil of a hurry, and the astonishment that ensued.  I had gone out of the theatre, for coolness, into the garden;—­there I had tumbled over some dogs, and, coming away from them in very ill humour, encountered the man in a worse, which produced all this confusion.

“Well—­and why don’t you ’launch?’—­Now is your time.  The people are tolerably tired with me, and not very much enamoured of * *, who has just spawned a quarto of metaphysical blank verse, which is nevertheless only a part of a poem.

“Murray talks of divorcing Larry and Jacky—­a bad sign for the authors, who, I suppose, will be divorced too, and throw the blame upon one another.  Seriously, I don’t care a cigar about it, and I don’t see why Sam should.

     “Let me hear from and of you and my godson.  If a daughter, the
     name will do quite as well.