In Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Lord Byron, pages 176, 177., the poet is represented as stating that the lines—­

  “While Memory, with more than Egypt’s art,
  Embalming all the sorrows of the heart,
  Sits at the altar which she raised to woe,
  And feeds the source whence tears eternal flow!”

suggested to his mind, “by an unaccountable and incomprehensible power of association,” the thought—­

     “Memory, the mirror which affliction dashes to the earth, and,
     looking down upon the fragments, only beholds the reflection
     multiplied.”

afterwards apparently embodied in Childe Harold, iii. 33.

  “Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
  In every fragment multiplies; and makes
  A thousand images of one that was,
  The same, and still the more, the more it breaks.”

Now, Byron was, by his own showing, an ardent admirer of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.  See Moore’s Life of Byron, vol. i. page 144.  Notices of the year 1807.

Turn to Burton, and you will find the following passage:—­

     “And, as Praxiteles did by his glass, when he saw a scurvy face in
     it, brake it to pieces, but for that one, he saw many more as bad
     in a moment.”—­Part 2. sect. 3. mem. 7.

I am uncharitable enough to believe that Childe Harold owes far more to Burton, than to “the unaccountable and incomprehensible power of association.”

MELANION.

* * * * *

BILLINGSGATE.

I think your correspondent in No. 6. p. 93., starts on wrong premises; he seems to take for granted that such a structure as Belin’s Gate really existed.  Now the story entirely rests on the assertion of Geoffrey of Monmouth.  What amount of credit may be placed on that veracious and most unromantic historian, your correspondent doubtless knows better than myself.  Geoffrey says, in the 10th chap. of the 3rd book, that Belin, among other great works, made a wonderful gate on the bank of the Thames, and built over it a large tower, and under it a wharf for ships; and when he died his body was burned, and his ashes put into a golden urn on the top of the tower.  Stow seems to doubt it.  In Strype’s edition, 1720, he says, concerning this gate, “Leaving out the fable thereof faming it to be builded by King Belin, a Briton, long before the incarnation of Christ.”  Burton, writing 1722, mentions the legend, but adds, “But whether of that antiquity is doubted.” and John Brydall, in 1676, mentions it only as a wharf or quay for ships.  Now, as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Chronicle is generally allowed by critics to be but a mass of romance and monkish legends, built on a slight foundation of truth, we may suppose this account to partake of the general character of the rest of the work.  That some circumstance gave rise to the name is not doubted.  “Haply,”