with the rose-leaf mixed with the milder herb of the Levant.  I don’t know what liberty means,—­never having seen it,—­but wealth is power all over the world; and as a shilling performs the duty of a pound (besides sun and sky and beauty for nothing) in the East,—­that is the country.  How I envy Herodes Atticus!—­more than Pomponius.  And yet a little tumult, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a revolution, a battle, or an aventure of any lively description.  I think I rather would have been Bonneval, Ripperda, Alberoni, Hayreddin, or Horuc Barbarossa, or even Wortley Montague, than Mahomet himself.

“Rogers will be in town soon?—­the 23d is fixed for our Middleton visit.  Shall I go? umph!—­In this island, where one can’t ride out without overtaking the sea, it don’t much matter where one goes.

“I remember the effect of the first Edinburgh Review on me.  I heard of it six weeks before,—­read it the day of its denunciation,—­dined and drank three bottles of claret, (with S.B.  Davies, I think,) neither ate nor slept the less, but, nevertheless, was not easy till I had vented my wrath and my rhyme, in the same pages, against every thing and every body.  Like George, in the Vicar of Wakefield, ‘the fate of my paradoxes’ would allow me to perceive no merit in another.  I remembered only the maxim of my boxing-master, which, in my youth, was found useful in all general riots,—­’Whoever is not for you is against you—­mill away right and left,’ and so I did;—­like Ishmael, my hand was against all men, and all men’s anent me.  I did wonder, to be sure, at my own success—­

    “‘And marvels so much wit is all his own,’

as Hobhouse sarcastically says of somebody (not unlikely myself, as we are old friends);—­but were it to come over again, I would not.  I have since redde[94] the cause of my couplets, and it is not adequate to the effect.  C * * told me that it was believed I alluded to poor Lord Carlisle’s nervous disorder in one of the lines.  I thank Heaven I did not know it—­and would not, could not, if I had.  I must naturally be the last person to be pointed on defects or maladies.

“Rogers is silent,—­and, it is said, severe.  When he does talk, he talks well; and, on all subjects of taste, his delicacy of expression is pure as his poetry.  If you enter his house—­his drawing-room—­his library—­you of yourself say, this is not the dwelling of a common mind.  There is not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his chimney-piece, his sofa, his table, that does not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor.  But this very delicacy must be the misery of his existence.  Oh the jarrings his disposition must have encountered through life!

“Southey, I have not seen much of.  His appearance is Epic; and he is the only existing entire man of letters.  All the others have some pursuit annexed to their authorship.  His manners are mild, but not those of a man of the world, and his talents of the first order.  His prose is perfect.  Of his poetry there are various opinions:  there is, perhaps, too much of it for the present generation;—­posterity will probably select.  He has passages equal to any thing.  At present, he has a party, but no public—­except for his prose writings.  The life of Nelson is beautiful.