“I have heard of, and believe, that there are human beings so constituted as to be insensible to injuries; but I believe that the best mode to avoid taking vengeance is to get out of the way of temptation.  I hope that I may never have the opportunity, for I am not quite sure that I could resist it, having derived from my mother something of the ‘perfervidum ingenium Scotorum.’  I have not sought, and shall not seek it, and perhaps it may never come in my path.  I do not in this allude to the party, who might be right or wrong; but to many who made her cause the pretext of their own bitterness.  She, indeed, must have long avenged me in her own feelings, for whatever her reasons may have been (and she never adduced them to me at least), she probably neither contemplated nor conceived to what she became the means of conducting the father of her child, and the husband of her choice.

     “So much for ‘the general voice of his countrymen:’  I will now
     speak of some in particular.

“In the beginning of the year 1817, an article appeared in the Quarterly Review, written, I believe, by Walter Scott, doing great honour to him, and no disgrace to me, though both poetically and personally more than sufficiently favourable to the work and the author of whom it treated.  It was written at a time when a selfish man would not, and a timid one dared not, have said a word in favour of either; it was written by one to whom temporary public opinion had elevated me to the rank of a rival—­a proud distinction, and unmerited; but which has not prevented me from feeling as a friend, nor him from more than corresponding to that sentiment.  The article in question was written upon the third Canto of Childe Harold, and after many observations, which it would as ill become me to repeat as to forget, concluded with ’a hope that I might yet return to England.’  How this expression was received in England itself I am not acquainted, but it gave great offence at Rome to the respectable ten or twenty thousand English travellers then and there assembled.  I did not visit Rome till some time after, so that I had no opportunity of knowing the fact; but I was informed, long afterwards, that the greatest indignation had been manifested in the enlightened Anglo-circle of that year, which happened to comprise within it—­amidst a considerable leaven of Welbeck Street and Devonshire Place, broken loose upon their travels—­several really well-born and well-bred families, who did not the less participate in the feeling of the hour.  ’Why should he return to England?’ was the general exclamation—­I answer why?  It is a question I have occasionally asked myself, and I never yet could give it a satisfactory reply.  I had then no thoughts of returning, and if I have any now, they are of business, and not of pleasure.  Amidst the ties that have been dashed to pieces, there are links yet entire, though the chain itself be broken.  There are