If favourable, I do not deny that the praise elates, and if unfavourable, that the abuse irritates.  The latter may conduct me to inflict a species of satire which would neither do good to you nor to your friends:  they may smile now, and so may you; but if I took you all in hand, it would not be difficult to cut you up like gourds.  I did as much by as powerful people at nineteen years old, and I know little as yet, in three-and-thirty, which should prevent me from making all your ribs gridirons for your hearts, if such were my propensity:  but it is not; therefore let me hear none of your provocations.  If any thing occurs so very gross as to require my notice, I shall hear of it from my legal friends.  For the rest, I merely request to be left in ignorance.

“The same applies to opinions, good, bad, or indifferent, of persons in conversation or correspondence.  These do not interrupt, but they soil the current of my mind.  I am sensitive enough, but not till I am troubled; and here I am beyond the touch of the short arms of literary England, except the few feelers of the polypus that crawl over the channels in the way of extract.

“All these precautions in England would be useless; the libeller or the flatterer would there reach me in spite of all; but in Italy we know little of literary England, and think less, except what reaches us through some garbled and brief extract in some miserable gazette.  For two years (excepting two or three articles cut out and sent to you by the post) I never read a newspaper which was not forced upon me by some accident, and know, upon the whole, as little of England as you do of Italy, and God knows that is little enough, with all your travels, &c. &c. &c.  The English travellers know Italy as you know Guernsey:  how much is that?

     “If any thing occurs so violently gross or personal as requires
     notice, Mr. Douglas Kinnaird will let me know; but of praise I
     desire to hear nothing.

“You will say, ‘to what tends all this?’ I will answer THAT;—­to keep my mind free and unbiassed by all paltry and personal irritabilities of praise or censure—­to let my genius take its natural direction, while my feelings are like the dead, who know nothing and feel nothing of all or aught that is said or done in their regard.

“If you can observe these conditions, you will spare yourself and others some pain:  let me not be worked upon to rise up; for if I do, it will not be for a little.  If you cannot observe these conditions, we shall cease to be correspondents,—­but not friends, for I shall always be yours ever and truly,

     “BYRON.