“Got my seals * * * * * * Have again forgot a plaything for ma petite cousine Eliza; but I must send for it to-morrow.  I hope Harry will bring her to me.  I sent Lord Holland the proofs of the last ‘Giaour,’ and ‘The Bride of Abydos.’  He won’t like the latter, and I don’t think that I shall long.  It was written in four nights to distract my dreams from * *.  Were it not thus, it had never been composed; and had I not done something at that time, I must have gone mad, by eating my own heart,—­bitter diet!—­Hodgson likes it better than ‘The Giaour,’ but nobody else will,—­and he never liked the Fragment.  I am sure, had it not been for Murray, that would never have been published, though the circumstances which are the groundwork make it * * * heigh-ho!

“To-night I saw both the sisters of * *; my God! the youngest so like!  I thought I should have sprung across the house, and am so glad no one was with me in Lady H.’s box.  I hate those likenesses—­the mock-bird, but not the nightingale—­so like as to remind, so different as to be painful.[89] One quarrels equally with the points of resemblance and of distinction.

[Footnote 89: 

    “Earth holds no other like to thee,
    Or, if it doth, in vain for me: 
    For worlds I dare not view the dame
    Resembling thee, yet not the same.” 
    THE GIAOUR.
]

“Nov. 17.

“No letter from * *; but I must not complain.  The respectable Job says, ‘Why should a living man complain?’ I really don’t know, except it be that a dead man can’t; and he, the said patriarch, did complain, nevertheless, till his friends were tired and his wife recommended that pious prologue, ‘Curse—­and die;’ the only time, I suppose, when but little relief is to be found in swearing.  I have had a most kind letter from Lord Holland on ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ which he likes, and so does Lady H. This is very good-natured in both, from whom I don’t deserve any quarter.  Yet I did think, at the time, that my cause of enmity proceeded from Holland House, and am glad I was wrong, and wish I had not been in such a hurry with that confounded satire, of which I would suppress even the memory;—­but people, now they can’t get it, make a fuss, I verily believe, out of contradiction.

“George Ellis and Murray have been talking something about Scott and me, George pro Scoto,—­and very right too.  If they want to depose him, I only wish they would not set me up as a competitor.  Even if I had my choice, I would rather be the Earl of Warwick than all the kings he ever made!  Jeffrey and Gifford I take to be the monarch-makers in poetry and prose.  The British Critic, in their Rokeby Review, have presupposed a comparison, which I am sure my friends never thought of, and W. Scott’s subjects are injudicious in descending to.  I like the man—­and admire his works to what Mr. Braham calls Entusymusy.  All such stuff can only vex him, and do me no good.  Many hate his politics—­(I hate all politics); and, here, a man’s politics are like the Greek soul—­an [Greek:  eidolon], besides God knows what other soul; but their estimate of the two generally go together.