“When I met old Courtenay, the orator, at Rogers’s, the poet’s, in 1811-12, I was much taken with the portly remains of his fine figure, and the still acute quickness of his conversation.  It was he who silenced Flood in the English House by a crushing reply to a hasty debut of the rival of Grattan in Ireland.  I asked Courtenay (for I like to trace motives) if he had not some personal provocation; for the acrimony of his answer seemed to me, as I had read it, to involve it.  Courtenay said ’he had; that, when in Ireland (being an Irishman), at the bar of the Irish House of Commons, Flood had made a personal and unfair attack upon himself, who, not being a member of that House, could not defend himself, and that some years afterwards the opportunity of retort offering in the English Parliament, he could not resist it.’  He certainly repaid Flood with interest, for Flood never made any figure, and only a speech or two afterwards, in the English House of Commons.  I must except, however, his speech on Reform in 1790, which Fox called ‘the best he ever heard upon that subject.’”

For some time he had entertained thoughts of going again abroad; and it appeared, indeed, to be a sort of relief to him, whenever he felt melancholy or harassed, to turn to the freedom and solitude of a life of travel as his resource.  During the depression of spirits which he laboured under, while printing Childe Harold, “he would frequently,” says Mr. Dallas, “talk of selling Newstead, and of going to reside at Naxos, in the Grecian Archipelago,—­to adopt the eastern costume and customs, and to pass his time in studying the Oriental languages and literature.”  The excitement of the triumph that soon after ensued, and the success which, in other pursuits besides those of literature, attended him, again diverted his thoughts from these migratory projects.  But the roving fit soon returned; and we have seen, from one of his letters to Mr. William Bankes, that he looked forward to finding himself, in the course of this spring, among the mountains of his beloved Greece once more.  For a time, this plan was exchanged for the more social project of accompanying his friends, the family of Lord Oxford, to Sicily; and it was while engaged in his preparatives for this expedition that the annexed letters were written.

[Footnote 71:  His speech was on presenting a petition from Major Cartwright.]

* * * * *

LETTER 121.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Maidenhead, June 13. 1813.

“* * * I have read the ‘Strictures,’ which are just enough, and not grossly abusive, in very fair couplets.  There is a note against Massinger near the end, and one cannot quarrel with one’s company, at any rate.  The author detects some incongruous figures in a passage of English Bards, page 23., but which edition I do not know.  In the sole copy in your