“The Abbot has just arrived; many thanks; as also for the
     Monastery—­when you send it!!!

“The Abbot will have a more than ordinary interest for me, for an ancestor of mine by the mother’s side, Sir J. Gordon of Gight, the handsomest of his day, died on a scaffold at Aberdeen for his loyalty to Mary, of whom he was an imputed paramour as well as her relation.  His fate was much commented on in the Chronicles of the times.  If I mistake not, he had something to do with her escape from Loch Leven, or with her captivity there.  But this you will know better than I.

“I recollect Loch Leven as it were but yesterday.  I saw it in my way to England in 1798, being then ten years of age.  My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line from the old Gordons, not the Seyton Gordons, as she disdainfully termed the ducal branch, told me the story, always reminding me how superior her Gordons were to the southern Byrons, notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother’s Gordons had done in her own person.

     “I have written to you so often lately, that the brevity of this
     will be welcome.  Yours,” &c.

* * * * *

LETTER 393.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, 8bre 17 deg., 1820.

     “Enclosed is the Dedication of Marino Faliero to Goethe. 
     Query,—­is his title Baron or not?  I think yes.  Let me know your
     opinion, and so forth.

     “P.S.  Let me know what Mr. Hobhouse and you have decided about the
     two prose letters and their publication.

“I enclose you an Italian abstract of the German translator of Manfred’s Appendix, in which you will perceive quoted what Goethe says of the whole body of English poetry (and not of me in particular).  On this the Dedication is founded, as you will perceive, though I had thought of it before, for I look upon him as a great man.”

* * * * *

The very singular Dedication transmitted with this letter has never before been published, nor, as far as I can learn, ever reached the hands of the illustrious German.  It is written in the poet’s most whimsical and mocking mood; and the unmeasured severity poured out in it upon the two favourite objects of his wrath and ridicule compels me to deprive the reader of some of its most amusing passages.

DEDICATION TO BARON GOETHE, &c. &c. &c.