not suspect you in earnest.  Modest again!  Because I don’t do a very shabby thing, it seems, I ‘don’t fear your competition.’  If it were reduced to an alternative of preference, I should dread you, as much as Satan does Michael.  But is there not room enough in our respective regions?  Go on—­it will soon be my turn to forgive.  To-day I dine with Mackintosh and Mrs. Stale—­as John Bull may be pleased to denominate Corinne—­whom I saw last night, at Covent Garden, yawning over the humour of Falstaff.

“The reputation of ‘gloom,’ if one’s friends are not included in the reputants, is of great service; as it saves one from a legion of impertinents, in the shape of common-place acquaintance.  But thou know’st I can be a right merry and conceited fellow, and rarely ‘larmoyant.’  Murray shall reinstate your line forthwith.[85] I believe the blunder in the motto was mine:—­and yet I have, in general, a memory for you, and am sure it was rightly printed at first.

     “I do ‘blush’ very often, if I may believe Ladies H. and M.;—­but
     luckily, at present, no one sees me.  Adieu.”

[Footnote 85:  The motto to The Giaour, which is taken from one of the Irish Melodies, had been quoted by him incorrectly in the first editions of the poem.  He made afterwards a similar mistake in the lines from Burns prefixed to the Bride of Abydos.]

* * * * *

LETTER 141.  TO MR. MOORE.

     “November 30. 1813.

“Since I last wrote to you, much has occurred, good, bad, and indifferent,—­not to make me forget you, but to prevent me from reminding you of one who, nevertheless, has often thought of you, and to whom your thoughts, in many a measure, have frequently been a consolation.  We were once very near neighbours this autumn; and a good and bad neighbourhood it has proved to me.  Suffice it to say, that your French quotation was confoundedly to the purpose,—­though very unexpectedly pertinent, as you may imagine by what I said before, and my silence since.  However, ’Richard’s himself again,’ and except all night and some part of the morning, I don’t think very much about the matter.

“All convulsions end with me in rhyme; and to solace my midnights, I have scribbled another Turkish story[86]—­not a Fragment—­which you will receive soon after this.  It does not trench upon your kingdom in the least, and if it did, you would soon reduce me to my proper boundaries.  You will think, and justly, that I run some risk of losing the little I have gained in fame, by this further experiment on public patience; but I have really ceased to care on that head.  I have written this, and published it, for the sake of the employment,—­to wring my thoughts from reality, and take refuge in ‘imaginings,’ however ‘horrible;’