LETTER 122.  TO W. GIFFORD, ESQ.

     “June 18. 1813.

     “My dear Sir,

“I feel greatly at a loss how to write to you at all—­still more to thank you as I ought.  If you knew the veneration with which I have ever regarded you, long before I had the most distant prospect of becoming your acquaintance, literary or personal, my embarrassment would not surprise you.

“Any suggestion of yours, even were it conveyed in the less tender shape of the text of the Baviad, or a Monk Mason note in Massinger, would have been obeyed; I should have endeavoured to improve myself by your censure:  judge then if I should be less willing to profit by your kindness.  It is not for me to bandy compliments with my elders and my betters:  I receive your approbation with gratitude, and will not return my brass for your gold by expressing more fully those sentiments of admiration, which, however sincere, would, I know, be unwelcome.

“To your advice on religious topics, I shall equally attend.  Perhaps the best way will be by avoiding them altogether.  The already published objectionable passages have been much commented upon, but certainly have been rather strongly interpreted.  I am no bigot to infidelity, and did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of man, I should be charged with denying the existence of a God.  It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in comparison with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be over-rated.

“This, and being early disgusted with a Calvinistic Scotch school, where I was cudgelled to church for the first ten years of my life, afflicted me with this malady; for, after all, it is, I believe, a disease of the mind as much as other kinds of hypochondria."[73]

[Footnote 73:  The remainder of this letter, it appears, has been lost.]

* * * * *

LETTER 123.  TO MR. MOORE.

     “June 22. 1813.

“Yesterday I dined in company with ‘* *, the Epicene,’ whose politics are sadly changed.  She is for the Lord of Israel and the Lord of Liverpool—­a vile antithesis of a Methodist and a Tory—­talks of nothing but devotion and the ministry, and, I presume, expects that God and the government will help her to a pension.

“Murray, the [Greek:  anax] of publishers, the Anac of stationers, has a design upon you in the paper line.  He wants you to become the staple and stipendiary editor of a periodical work.  What say you?  Will you be bound, like ’Kit Smart, to write for ninety-nine years in the Universal Visiter?’ Seriously he talks of hundreds a year, and—­though I hate prating of the beggarly elements—­his