“As far as fame goes, I have had my share:  it has indeed been leavened by other human contingencies, and this in a greater degree than has occurred to most literary men of a decent rank in life; but, on the whole, I take it that such equipoise is the condition of humanity.”

Of the visit, too, of the American gentleman, he thus speaks in the same Journal.

“A young American, named Coolidge, called on me not many months ago.  He was intelligent, very handsome, and not more than twenty years old, according to appearances; a little romantic, but that sits well upon youth, and mighty fond of poesy, as may be suspected from his approaching me in my cavern.  He brought me a message from an old servant of my family (Joe Murray), and told me that he (Mr. Coolidge) had obtained a copy of my bust from Thorwaldsen at Rome, to send to America.  I confess I was more flattered by this young enthusiasm of a solitary trans-Atlantic traveller, than if they had decreed me a statue in the Paris Pantheon (I have seen emperors and demagogues cast down from their pedestals even in my own time, and Grattan’s name rased from the street called after him in Dublin); I say that I was more flattered by it, because it was single, unpolitical, and was without motive or ostentation,—­the pure and warm feeling of a boy for the poet he admired.  It must have been expensive, though;—­I would not pay the price of a Thorwaldsen bust for any human head and shoulders, except Napoleon’s, or my children’s, or some ‘absurd womankind’s,’ as Monkbarns calls them,—­or my sister’s.  If asked why, then, I sat for my own?—­Answer, that it was at the particular request of J.C.  Hobhouse, Esq. and for no one else.  A picture is a different matter;—­every body sits for their picture;—­but a bust looks like putting up pretensions to permanency, and smacks something of a hankering for public fame rather than private remembrance.

“Whenever an American requests to see me (which is not unfrequently), I comply, firstly, because I respect a people who acquired their freedom by their firmness without excess; and, secondly, because these trans-Atlantic visits, ‘few and far between,’ make me feel as if talking with posterity from the other side of the Styx.  In a century or two the new English and Spanish Atlantides will be masters of the old countries, in all probability, as Greece and Europe overcame their mother Asia in the older or earlier ages, as they are called.”

* * * * *

LETTER 437.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, July 6. 1821.