...  I find I made a great confusion of my portion of the legal expenses incurred by the Examiner, with the whole of them.  That portion only amounted to L750, the whole being L1500.  Of this L750 out of my pocket (which was quite enough), L250 went to pay for expenses (counsel, &c.) attendant on the failure of two Government prosecutions,—­one for saying (totidem verbis) that ’of all monarchs since the Revolution, the successor of George III would have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular’; (think, nowadays, of being prosecuted for that!) and the other for copying from the Stamford News the paragraph against military flogging, alluded to the other day in the Daily News. (Think, now, this moment, of being prosecuted for That!) The L500 fine and two years’ imprisonment was for ludicrously contrasting the Morning Post’s picture of the Regent as an ‘Adonis’, &c. with the old and real fat state of the case, and for adding that his Royal Highness had lived for ’upwards of half a century without doing anything to deserve the admiration of his contemporaries or the gratitude of posterity’.  Words to that effect, and I believe better,—­but I do not quite remember them.  They might be easily ascertained by reference to Peel’s Coffee-house, and the words of the Post, too.

Besides the fine, my imprisonment cost me several hundred pounds (I can’t exactly say how many) in monstrous douceurs to the gaoler for liberty to walk in the garden, for help towards getting me permission to fit up rooms in the sick hospital, and for fitting up said rooms, or rather converting them from sorts of washhouses, hitherto uninhabited and unfloored, into comfortable apartments,—­which I did too expensively,—­at least as far as papering the sitting-room with a trellis of roses went, and having my ceiling painted to imitate an out-of-door sky.  No notice, however, could be taken, I suppose, of any of this portion of the expenses, governments having nothing to do with the secret corruptions of gaolers or the pastorals of incarcerated poets:  otherwise the prosecutions cost me altogether a good bit beyond a thousand pounds.

But perhaps it might be mentioned that I went to prison from all but a sick bed, having been just ordered by the physician to go to the seaside, and ride for the benefit of my health (pleasing dramatic contrast to the verdict!).  I also declined, as I told you, to try avoiding the imprisonment by the help of Perry’s offer of the famous secret ‘Book’; and I further declined (as I think I also told you) to avail myself of an offer on the part of a royal agent (made, of course, in the guarded, though obvious manner in which such offers are conveyed), to drop the prosecution, provided we would agree to drop all future hostile mention of the Regent.  But of this, too, governments could not be expected to take notice—­perhaps