recollect nothing of “the rest of the company going into another room,”—­nor, though I well remember the topography of our host’s elegant and classically furnished mansion, could I swear to the very room where the conversation occurred, though the “taking down the poem” seems to fix it in the library.  Had it been “taken up” it would probably have been in the drawing-room.  I presume also that the “remarkable circumstance” took place after dinner; as I conceive that neither Mr. Bowles’s politeness nor appetite would have allowed him to detain “the rest of the company” standing round their chairs in the “other room,” while we were discussing “the Woods of Madeira,” instead of circulating its vintage.  Of Mr. Bowles’s “good humour” I have a full and not ungrateful recollection; as also of his gentlemanly manners and agreeable conversation.  I speak of the whole, and not of particulars; for whether he did or did not use the precise words printed in the pamphlet, I cannot say, nor could he with accuracy.  Of “the tone of seriousness” I certainly recollect nothing:  on the contrary, I thought Mr. Bowles rather disposed to treat the subject lightly:  for he said (I have no objection to be contradicted if incorrect), that some of his good-natured friends had come to him and exclaimed, “Eh!  Bowles! how came you to make the Woods of Madeira?” &c. &c. and that he had been at some pains and pulling down of the poem to convince them that he had never made “the Woods” do any thing of the kind.  He was right, and I was wrong, and have been wrong still up to this acknowledgment; for I ought to have looked twice before I wrote that which involved an inaccuracy capable of giving pain.  The fact was, that, although I had certainly before read “the Spirit of Discovery,” I took the quotation from the review.  But the mistake was mine, and not the review’s, which quoted the passage correctly enough, I believe.  I blundered—­God knows how—­into attributing the tremors of the lovers to “the Woods of Madeira,” by which they were surrounded.  And I hereby do fully and freely declare and asseverate, that the Woods did not tremble to a kiss, and that the lovers did.  I quote from memory—­

------“A kiss
Stole on the listening silence, &c. &c. 
They [the lovers] trembled, even as if the power,” &c.

And if I had been aware that this declaration would have been in the smallest degree satisfactory to Mr. Bowles, I should not have waited nine years to make it, notwithstanding that “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” had been suppressed some time previously to my meeting him at Mr. Rogers’s.  Our worthy host might indeed have told him as much, as it was at his representation that I suppressed it.  A new edition of that lampoon was preparing for the press, when Mr. Rogers represented to me, that “I was now acquainted with many of the persons mentioned in it, and with some on terms of intimacy;” and that he knew “one family in particular to