“P.S.  Please to append the letter about the Hellespont as a note to your next opportunity of the verses on Leander, &c. &c. &c. in Childe Harold.  Don’t forget it amidst your multitudinous avocations, which I think of celebrating in a Dithyrambic Ode to Albemarle Street.

     “Are you aware that Shelley has written an Elegy on Keats, and
     accuses the Quarterly of killing him?

        “’Who kill’d John Keats?”
          ‘I,’ says the Quarterly,
        So savage and Tartarly;
          ‘Twas one of my feats.’

        “‘Who shot the arrow?’
          The poet-priest Milman
          (So ready to kill man),
        Or Southey or Barrow.’

“You know very well that I did not approve of Keats’s poetry, or principles of poetry, or of his abuse of Pope; but, as he is dead, omit all that is said about him in any MSS. of mine, or publication.  His Hyperion is a fine monument, and will keep his name.  I do not envy the man who wrote the article;—­you Review people have no more right to kill than any other footpads.  However, he who would die of an article in a Review would probably have died of something else equally trivial.  The same thing nearly happened to Kirke White, who died afterwards of a consumption.”

* * * * *

LETTER 442.  TO MR. MOORE.

     “Ravenna, August 2. 1821.

“I had certainly answered your last letter, though but briefly, to the part to which you refer, merely saying, ‘damn the controversy;’ and quoting some verses of George Colman’s, not as allusive to you, but to the disputants.  Did you receive this letter?  It imports me to know that our letters are not intercepted or mislaid.

“Your Berlin drama [44] is an honour, unknown since the days of Elkanah Settle, whose ‘Emperor of Morocco’ was represented by the Court ladies, which was, as Johnson says, ’the last blast of inflammation’ to poor Dryden, who could not bear it, and fell foul of Settle without mercy or moderation, on account of that and a frontispiece, which he dared to put before his play.

     “Was not your showing the Memoranda to * * somewhat perilous?  Is
     there not a facetious allusion or two which might as well be
     reserved for posterity?

“I know S * * well—­that is to say, I have met him occasionally at Copet.  Is he not also touched lightly in the Memoranda?  In a review of Childe Harold, Canto 4th, three years ago, in Blackwood’s Magazine, they quote some stanzas of an elegy of S * ’s on Rome, from which they say that I _might_ have taken some ideas.  I give you my honour that I never saw it except in that criticism, which gives, I think, three or four stanzas, sent them (they say) for the nonce by a correspondent—­perhaps himself.  The fact is easily proved; for