This letter was, of course (like most of those he addressed to England at this time), intended to be shown; and having been, among others, permitted to see it, I took occasion, in my very next communication to Lord Byron, to twit him a little with the passage in it relating to myself,—­the only one, as far as I can learn, that ever fell from my noble friend’s pen during our intimacy, in which he has spoken of me otherwise than in terms of kindness and the most undeserved praise.  Transcribing his own words, as well as I could recollect them, at the top of my letter, I added, underneath, “Is this the way you speak of your friends?” Not long after, too, when visiting him at Venice, I remember making the same harmless little sneer a subject of raillery with him; but he declared boldly that he had no recollection of having ever written such words, and that, if they existed, “he must have been half asleep when he wrote them.”

I have mentioned the circumstance merely for the purpose of remarking, that with a sensibility vulnerable at so many points as his was, and acted upon by an imagination so long practised in self-tormenting, it is only wonderful that, thinking constantly, as his letters prove him to have been, of distant friends, and receiving from few or none equal proofs of thoughtfulness in return, he should not more frequently have broken out into such sallies against the absent and “unreplying.”  For myself, I can only say that, from the moment I began to unravel his character, the most slighting and even acrimonious expressions that I could have heard he had, in a fit of spleen, uttered against me, would have no more altered my opinion of his disposition, nor disturbed my affection for him, than the momentary clouding over of a bright sky could leave an impression on the mind of gloom, after its shadow had passed away.

* * * * *

LETTER 336.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, August 9. 1819.

“Talking of blunders reminds me of Ireland—­Ireland of Moore.  What is this I see in Galignani about ‘Bermuda—­agent—­deputy—­appeal—­attachment,’ &c.?  What is the matter?  Is it any thing in which his friends can be of use to him?  Pray inform me.

“Of Don Juan I hear nothing further from you; * * *, but the papers don’t seem so fierce as the letter you sent me seemed to anticipate, by their extracts at least in Galignani’s Messenger.  I never saw such a set of fellows as you are!  And then the pains taken to exculpate the modest publisher—­he remonstrated, forsooth!  I will write a preface that shall exculpate you and * * *, &c. completely, on that point; but, at the same time, I will cut you up, like gourds.  You have no more soul than the Count de Caylus, (who assured his friends, on his death-bed, that he had none, and that he must know better than they whether he had one or no,) and no