“My best remembrances to Lady H. Will you be good enough to decide between the various readings marked, and erase the other; or our deliverer may be as puzzled as a commentator, and belike repeat both.  If these versicles won’t do, I will hammer out some more endecasyllables.

     “P.S.—­Tell Lady H. I have had sad work to keep out the Phoenix—­I
     mean the Fire Office of that name.  It has insured the theatre, and
     why not the Address?”

* * * * *

TO LORD HOLLAND.

“September 24.

“I send a recast of the four first lines of the concluding
paragraph.

“This greeting o’er, the ancient rule obey’d,
The drama’s homage by her Herald paid,
Receive our welcome too, whose every tone
Springs from our hearts, and fain would win your own. 
The curtain rises, &c. &c.

And do forgive all this trouble.  See what it is to have to do even
with the genteelest of us.  Ever,” &c.

* * * * *

LETTER 99.  TO LORD HOLLAND.

“September 26. 1812.

     “You will think there is no end to my villanous emendations.  The
     fifth and sixth lines I think to alter thus:—­

        “Ye who beheld—­oh sight admired and mourn’d,
        Whose radiance mock’d the ruin it adorn’d;

because ‘night’ is repeated the next line but one; and, as it now stands, the conclusion of the paragraph, ’worthy him (Shakspeare) and you,’ appears to apply the ‘you’ to those only who were out of bed and in Covent Garden Market on the night of conflagration, instead of the audience or the discerning public at large, all of whom are intended to be comprised in that comprehensive and, I hope, comprehensible pronoun.

     “By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent yesterday
     has dived into the bathos some sixty fathom—­

        “When Garrick died, and Brinsley ceased to write.

Ceasing to live is a much more serious concern, and ought not to be first; therefore I will let the old couplet stand, with its half rhymes ‘sought’ and ’wrote.’[51] Second thoughts in every thing are best, but, in rhyme, third and fourth don’t come amiss.  I am very anxious on this business, and I do hope that the very trouble I occasion you will plead its own excuse, and that it will tend to show my endeavour to make the most of the time allotted.  I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another.  I always scrawl in this way, and smooth as much as I can, but never sufficiently; and, latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning.  When I began ‘Childe Harold,’ I had never tried Spenser’s measure, and now I cannot