“I sent it in a letter to the editor,
      Who thank’d me duly by return of post—­
    I’m for a handsome article his creditor;
      Yet if my gentle Muse he please to roast,
    And break a promise after having made it her,
      Denying the receipt of what it cost,
    And smear his page with gall instead of honey,
    All I can say is—­that he had the money.”

On the appearance of the poem, the learned editor of the Review in question allowed himself to be decoyed into the ineffable absurdity of taking the charge as serious, and, in his succeeding number, came forth with an indignant contradiction of it.  To this tempting subject the letter, written so hastily off at Bologna, related; but, though printed for Mr. Murray, in a pamphlet consisting of twenty-three pages, it was never published by him.[43] Being valuable, however, as one of the best specimens we have of Lord Byron’s simple and thoroughly English prose, I shall here preserve some extracts from it.

[Footnote 43:  It appeared afterwards in the Liberal.]

* * * * *

“TO THE EDITOR OF THE BRITISH REVIEW.

     “My dear R——­ts,

“As a believer in the Church of England—­to say nothing of the State—­I have been an occasional reader, and great admirer, though not a subscriber, to your Review.  But I do not know that any article of its contents ever gave me much surprise till the eleventh of your late twenty-seventh number made its appearance.  You have there most manfully refuted a calumnious accusation of bribery and corruption, the credence of which in the public mind might not only have damaged your reputation as a clergyman and an editor, but, what would have been still worse, have injured the circulation of your journal; which, I regret to hear, is not so extensive as the ‘purity (as you well observe) of its, &c. &c.’ and the present taste for propriety, would induce us to expect.  The charge itself is of a solemn nature; and, although in verse, is couched in terms of such circumstantial gravity as to induce a belief little short of that generally accorded to the thirty-nine articles, to which you so generously subscribed on taking your degrees.  It is a charge the most revolting to the heart of man from its frequent occurrence; to the mind of a statesman from its occasional truth; and to the soul of an editor from its moral impossibility.  You are charged then in the last line of one octave stanza, and the whole eight lines of the next, viz. 209th and 210th of the first Canto of that ‘pestilent poem,’ Don Juan, with receiving, and still more foolishly acknowledging, the receipt of certain moneys to eulogise the unknown author, who by this account must be known to you, if to nobody else.  An impeachment of this nature, so seriously made, there is but one way of refuting; and it is my firm persuasion, that whether you did or did not (and I believe that you did not) receive the