“Has not your Potatoe Committee been blundering?  Your advertisement says, that Mr. L. Callaghan (a queer name for a banker) hath been disposing of money in Ireland ‘sans authority of the Committee.’  I suppose it will end in Callaghan’s calling out the Committee, the chairman of which carries pistols in his pocket, of course.

“When you can spare time from duetting, coquetting, and claretting with your Hibernians of both sexes, let me have a line from you.  I doubt whether Paris is a good place for the composition of your new poesy.”

[Footnote 82:  “Received from Mr. Henry Dunn the sum of two hundred Tuscan crowns (for account of the Right Honourable Lord Noel Byron), for the purpose of assisting the Irish poor.

“Thomas Hall.

“Leghorn, 9th July, 1822.  Tuscan crowns, 200.”]

* * * * *

LETTER 502.  TO MR. MOORE.

     “Pisa, August 8. 1822.

“You will have heard by this time that Shelley and another gentleman (Captain Williams) were drowned about a month ago (a month yesterday), in a squall off the Gulf of Spezia.  There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken.  It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it.[83]

“I have not seen the thing you mention[84], and only heard of it casually, nor have I any desire.  The price is, as I saw in some advertisements, fourteen shillings, which is too much to pay for a libel on oneself.  Some one said in a letter, that it was a Doctor Watkins, who deals in the life and libel line.  It must have diminished your natural pleasure, as a friend (vide Rochefoucault), to see yourself in it.

“With regard to the Blackwood fellows, I never published any thing against them; nor, indeed, have seen their magazine (except in Galignani’s extracts) for these three years past.  I once wrote, a good while ago, some remarks [85] on their review of Don Juan, but saying very little about themselves, and these were not published.  If you think that I ought to follow your example[86](and I like to be in your company when I can) in contradicting their impudence, you may shape this declaration of mine into a similar paragraph for me.  It is possible that you may have seen the little I did write (and never published) at Murray’s;—­it contained much more about Southey than about the Blacks.

“If you think that I ought to do any thing about Watkins’s book, I should not care much about publishing my Memoir now, should it be necessary to counteract the fellow.  But, in that case, I should like to look over the press myself.  Let me know what you think, or whether I had better not;—­at least, not the second part, which touches on