would comport
    with my dignity,
That the author of Christabel ever should smart from such vulgar malignity.  (You remember perhaps that was one of the first little things that I
    carolled
After finishing Marmion, the Princess, the Song of the Shirt, and
    Childe Harold.)
Oh, doubtless it always has been so—­Ah, doubtless it always will be—­ There are men who would say that myself is a different person from me.  Better the porridge of patience a poor man snuffs in his plate Than the water of poisonous laurels distilled by the fingers of hate.

  ’Tis a dark-purple sort of a moonlighted kind of a midnight, I know;
You remember those verses I wrote on Irene, from Edgar A. Poe?  It was Lady Aholibah Levison, daughter of old Lord St. Giles, Who inspired those delectable strains, and rewarded her bard with her
    smiles. 
There are tasters who’ve sipped of Castalia, who don’t look on my
    brew as the brew: 
There are fools who can’t think why the names of my heroines of title
    should always be Hebrew. 
‘Twas my comrade, Sir Alister Knox, said, “Noo, dinna ye fash wi’
    Apollo, mon;
Gang to Jewry for wives and for concubines, lad—­look at David and
    Solomon. 
And it gives an erotico-scriptural twang,” said that high-born young
    man, “—­tickles
The lug” (he meant ear) “of the reader—­to throw in a touch of the
    Canticles.” 
So I versified half of The Preacher—­it took me a week, working slowly. 
    Bah! 
You don’t half know the sex, Bill—­they like it.  And what if her name
    was Aholibah? 
I recited her charms, in conjunction with those of a girl at the cafe, In a poem I published in collaboration with Templeton (Taffy).  There are prudes in a world full of envy—­and some of them thought it
    too strong
To compare an earl’s daughter by name with a girl at a French restaurant.  I regarded her, though, with the chivalrous eyes of a knight-errant on
    quest;
I may say I don’t know that I ever felt prouder, old friend, of a conquest.  And when I’ve been made happy, I never have cared a brass farthing who
    knew it; I
Thank my stars I’m as free from mock-modesty, friend, as from vulgar
    fatuity. 
I can’t say if my spirit retains—­for the subject appears to me misty—­any
    tie
To such associations as Poesy weaves round the records of Christianity.  There are bards—­I may be one myself—­who delight in their skill to unlock
    a lip’s
Rosy secrets by kisses and whispers of texts from the charming Apocalypse.  It was thus that I won, by such biblical pills of poetical manna, From two elders—­Sir Seth and Lord Isaac—­the liking of Lady Susanna.  But I left her—­a woman to me is no more than a match, sir, at tennis is—­ When I heard she’d gone off with my valet, and burnt my rhymed version
    of Genesis. 
You may see by my shortness of speech that my time’s