“I owe to you far more than the usual obligation for the courtesies of literature and common friendship; for you went out of your way in 1817 to do me a service, when it required not merely kindness, but courage to do so:  to have been recorded by you in such a manner, would have been a proud memorial at any time, but at such a time when ‘all the world and his wife,’ as the proverb goes, were trying to trample upon me, was something still higher to my self-esteem,—­I allude to the Quarterly Review of the Third Canto of Childe Harold, which Murray told me was written by you,—­and, indeed, I should have known it without his information, as there could not be two who could and would have done this at the time.  Had it been a common criticism, however eloquent or panegyrical, I should have felt pleased, undoubtedly, and grateful, but not to the extent which the extraordinary good-heartedness of the whole proceeding must induce in any mind capable of such sensations.  The very tardiness of this acknowledgment will, at least, show that I have not forgotten the obligation; and I can assure you that my sense of it has been out at compound interest during the delay.  I shall only add one word upon the subject, which is, that I think that you, and Jeffrey, and Leigh Hunt were the only literary men, of numbers whom I know (and some of whom I had served), who dared venture even an anonymous word in my favour just then:  and that, of those three, I had never seen one at all—­of the second much less than I desired—­and that the third was under no kind of obligation to me, whatever; while the other two had been actually attacked by me on a former occasion; one, indeed, with some provocation, but the other wantonly enough.  So you see you have been heaping ‘coals of fire, &c.’ in the true gospel manner, and I can assure you that they have burnt down to my very heart.

“I am glad that you accepted the Inscription.  I meant to have inscribed ‘The Foscarini’ to you instead; but first, I heard that ‘Cain’ was thought the least bad of the two as a composition; and, 2dly, I have abused S * * like a pickpocket, in a note to the Foscarini, and I recollected that he is a friend of yours (though not of mine), and that it would not be the handsome thing to dedicate to one friend any thing containing such matters about another.  However, I’ll work the Laureate before I have done with him, as soon as I can muster Billingsgate therefor.  I like a row, and always did from a boy, in the course of which propensity, I must needs say, that I have found it the most easy of all to be gratified, personally and poetically.  You disclaim ‘jealousies;’ but I would ask, as Boswell did of Johnson, ’of whom could you be jealous?’—­of none of the living certainly, and (taking all and all into consideration) of which of the dead?