never spoke but with curses or jeers’—­must run either ‘a name only uttered with curses or jeers,’ or, ’a wretch never named but with curses or jeers.’  Be_case_ as how, ‘spoke’ is not grammar, except in the House of Commons; and I doubt whether we can say ‘a name spoken,’ for mentioned.  I have some doubts, too, about ’repay,’—­’and for murder repay with a shout and a smile.’  Should it not be, ’and for murder repay him with shouts and a smile, ’or ‘reward him with shouts and a smile?’

“So, pray put your poetical pen through the MS. and take the least bad of the emendations.  Also, if there be any further breaking of Priscian’s head, will you apply a plaster?  I wrote in the greatest hurry and fury, and sent it to you the day after; so, doubtless, there will be some awful constructions, and a rather lawless conscription of rhythmus.

“With respect to what Anna Seward calls ’the liberty of transcript,’—­when complaining of Miss Matilda Muggleton, the accomplished daughter of a choral vicar of Worcester Cathedral, who had abused the said ‘liberty of transcript,’ by inserting in the Malvern Mercury Miss Seward’s ‘Elegy on the South Pole,’ as her own production, with her own signature, two years after having taken a copy, by permission of the authoress—­with regard, I say, to the ‘liberty of transcript,’ I by no means oppose an occasional copy to the benevolent few, provided it does not degenerate into such licentiousness of Verb and Noun as may tend to ’disparage my parts of speech’ by the carelessness of the transcribblers.

“I do not think that there is much danger of the ’King’s Press being abused’ upon the occasion, if the publishers of journals have any regard for their remaining liberty of person.  It is as pretty a piece of invective as ever put publisher in the way to ‘Botany.’  Therefore, if they meddle with it, it is at their peril.  As for myself, I will answer any jontleman—­though I by no means recognise a ‘right of search’ into an unpublished production and unavowed poem.  The same applies to things published sans consent.  I hope you like, at least, the concluding lines of the Pome?

“What are you doing, and where are you? in England?  Nail Murray—­nail him to his own counter, till he shells out the thirteens.  Since I wrote to you, I have sent him another tragedy—­’Cain’ by name—­making three in MS. now in his hands, or in the printer’s.  It is in the Manfred, metaphysical style, and full of some Titanic declamation;—­Lucifer being one of the dram. pers. who takes Cain a voyage among the stars, and afterwards to ‘Hades,’ where he shows him the phantoms of a former world, and its inhabitants.  I have gone upon the notion of Cuvier, that the world has been destroyed three or four times, and was inhabited by mammoths, behemoths, and what not; but not by man till