which way is the wind? The said article is so very mild and sentimental, that it must be written by Jeffrey in love;—­you know he is gone to America to marry some fair one, of whom he has been, for several quarters, eperdument amoureux.  Seriously—­as Winifred Jenkins says of Lismahago—­Mr. Jeffrey (or his deputy) ‘has done the handsome thing by me,’ and I say nothing.  But this I will say, if you and I had knocked one another on the head in this quarrel, how he would have laughed, and what a mighty bad figure we should have cut in our posthumous works.  By the by, I was called in the other day to mediate between two gentlemen bent upon carnage, and,—­after a long struggle between the natural desire of destroying one’s fellow-creatures, and the dislike of seeing men play the fool for nothing,—­I got one to make an apology, and the other to take it, and left them to live happy ever after.  One was a peer, the other a friend untitled, and both fond of high play;—­and one, I can swear for, though very mild, ’not fearful,’ and so dead a shot, that, though the other is the thinnest of men, he would have split him like a cane.  They both conducted themselves very well, and I put them out of pain as soon as I could.

“There is an American Life of G.F.  Cooke, Scurra deceased, lately published.  Such a book!—­I believe, since Drunken Barnaby’s Journal, nothing like it has drenched the press.  All green-room and tap-room—­drams and the drama—­brandy, whisky-punch, and, latterly, toddy, overflow every page.  Two things are rather marvellous,—­first, that a man should live so long drunk, and, next, that he should have found a sober biographer.  There are some very laughable things in it, nevertheless;—­but the pints he swallowed, and the parts he performed, are too regularly registered.

“All this time you wonder I am not gone; so do I; but the accounts of the plague are very perplexing—­not so much for the thing itself as the quarantine established in all ports, and from all places, even from England.  It is true, the forty or sixty days would, in all probability, be as foolishly spent on shore as in the ship; but one like’s to have one’s choice, nevertheless.  Town is awfully empty; but not the worse for that.  I am really puzzled with my perfect ignorance of what I mean to do;—­not stay, if I can help it, but where to go?[77] Sligo is for the North;—­a pleasant place, Petersburgh, in September, with one’s ears and nose in a muff, or else tumbling into one’s neckcloth or pocket-handkerchief!  If the winter treated Buonaparte with so little ceremony, what would it inflict upon your solitary traveller?—­Give me a sun, I care not how hot, and sherbet, I care not how cool, and my Heaven is as easily made as your Persian’s.[78] The Giaour is now a thousand and odd lines.  ‘Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day,’ eh, Moore?—­thou wilt needs be a wag, but I forgive it.  Yours ever,

     “BN.