While by one friend I was thus unconsciously, if not innocently, drawn into the scrape, the other was not slow in rendering me the same friendly service;—­for, on the appearance of Lord Byron’s answer to Mr. Bowles, I had the mortification of finding that, with a far less pardonable want of reserve, he had all but named me as his authority for an anecdote of his reverend opponent’s early days, which I had, in the course of an after-dinner conversation, told him at Venice, and which,—­pleasant in itself, and, whether true or false, harmless,—­derived its sole sting from the manner in which the noble disputant triumphantly applied it.  Such are the consequences of one’s near and dear friends taking to controversy.]

* * * * *

LETTER 435.  TO MR. MOORE.

     “Ravenna, June 22. 1821.

“Your dwarf of a letter came yesterday.  That is right;—­keep to your ’magnum opus ’—­magnoperate away.  Now, if we were but together a little to combine our ‘Journal of Trevoux!’ But it is useless to sigh, and yet very natural,—­for I think you and I draw better together, in the social line, than any two other living authors.

“I forgot to ask you, if you had seen your own panegyric in the correspondence of Mrs. Waterhouse and Colonel Berkeley?  To be sure their moral is not quite exact; but your passion is fully effective; and all poetry of the Asiatic kind—­I mean Asiatic, as the Romans called Asiatic oratory,’ and not because the scenery is Oriental—­must be tried by that test only.  I am not quite sure that I shall allow the Miss Byrons (legitimate or illegitimate) to read Lalla Rookh—­in the first place, on account of this said passion; and, in the second, that they mayn’t discover that there was a better poet than papa.

     “You say nothing of politics—­but, alas! what can be said?

        “The world is a bundle of hay,
          Mankind are the asses who pull,
        Each tugs it a different way,—­
          And the greatest of all is John Bull!

“How do you call your new project?  I have sent Murray a new tragedy, ycleped ‘Sardanapalus,’ writ according to Aristotle—­all, save the chorus—­could not reconcile me to that.  I have begun another, and am in the second act;—­so you see I saunter on as usual.

“Bowles’s answers have reached me; but I can’t go on disputing for ever,—­particularly in a polite manner.  I suppose he will take being silent for silenced.  He has been so civil that I can’t find it in my liver to be facetious with him,—­else I had a savage joke or two at his service. * * *

“I can’t send you the little journal, because it is in boards, and I can’t trust it per post.  Don’t suppose it is any thing particular; but it will show the intentions