of your own powers, which I cannot account for, and which must be unaccountable, when a Cossac like me can appal a cuirassier.  Your story I did not, could not, know,—­I thought only of a Peri.  I wish you had confided in me, not for your sake, but mine, and to prevent the world from losing a much better poem than my own, but which, I yet hope, this clashing will not even now deprive them of.[87] Mine is the work of a week, written, why I have partly told you, and partly I cannot tell you by letter—­some day I will.

“Go on—­I shall really be very unhappy if I at all interfere with you.  The success of mine is yet problematical; though the public will probably purchase a certain quantity, on the presumption of their own propensity for ‘The Giaour’ and such ‘horrid mysteries.’  The only advantage I have is being on the spot; and that merely amounts to saving me the trouble of turning over books which I had better read again.  If your chamber was furnished in the same way, you have no need to go there to describe—­I mean only as to accuracy—­because I drew it from recollection.

“This last thing of mine may have the same fate, and I assure you I have great doubts about it.  But, even if not, its little day will be over before you are ready and willing.  Come out—­’screw your courage to the sticking-place.’  Except the Post Bag (and surely you cannot complain of a want of success there), you have not been regularly out for some years.  No man stands higher,—­whatever you may think on a rainy day, in your provincial retreat.  ’Aucun homme, dans aucune langue, n’a ete, peut-etre, plus completement le poete du coeur et le poete des femmes.  Les critiques lui reprochent de n’avoir represente le monde ni tel qu’il est, ni tel qu’il doit etre; mais les femmes repondent qu’il l’a represente tel qu’elles le desirent.’—­I should have thought Sismondi had written this for you instead of Metastasio.

     “Write to me, and tell me of yourself.  Do you remember what
     Rousseau said to some one—­’Have we quarrelled? you have talked to
     me often, and never once mentioned yourself.’

“P.S.—­The last sentence is an indirect apology for my own egotism,—­but I believe in letters it is allowed.  I wish it was mutual.  I have met with an odd reflection in Grimm; it shall not—­at least the bad part—­be applied to you or me, though one of us has certainly an indifferent name—­but this it is:—­’Many people have the reputation of being wicked, with whom we should be too happy to pass our lives.’  I need not add it is a woman’s saying—­a Mademoiselle de Sommery’s.”

[Footnote 87:  Among the stories intended to be introduced into Lalla Rookh, which I had begun, but, from various causes, never finished, there was one which I had made some progress in, at the time of the appearance of “The Bride,” and which, on