“So you epigrammatise upon my epigram?  I will pay you for that, mind if I don’t, some day.  I never let any one off in the long run (who first begins).  Remember * * *, and see if I don’t do you as good a turn.  You unnatural publisher! what! quiz your own authors? you are a paper cannibal!

“In the Letter on Bowles (which I sent by Tuesday’s post) after the words ‘attempts had been made’ (alluding to the republication of ’English Bards’), add the words, ‘in Ireland;’ for I believe that English pirates did not begin their attempts till after I had left England the second time.  Pray attend to this.  Let me know what you and your synod think on Bowles.

“I did not think the second seal so bad; surely it is far better than the Saracen’s head with which you have sealed your last letter; the larger, in profile, was surely much better than that.

“So Foscolo says he will get you a seal cut better in Italy? he means a throat—­that is the only thing they do dexterously.  The Arts—­all but Canova’s, and Morghen’s, and Ovid’s (I don’t mean poetry),—­are as low as need be:  look at the seal which I gave to William Bankes, and own it.  How came George Bankes to quote ‘English Bards’ in the House of Commons?  All the world keep flinging that poem in my face.

     “Belzoni is a grand traveller, and his English is very prettily
     broken.

     “As for news, the Barbarians are marching on Naples, and if they
     lose a single battle, all Italy will be up.  It will be like the
     Spanish row, if they have any bottom.

“’Letters opened?—­to be sure they are, and that’s the reason why I always put in my opinion of the German Austrian scoundrels.  There is not an Italian who loathes them more than I do; and whatever I could do to scour Italy and the earth of their infamous oppression would be done con amore.

     “Yours,” &c.

* * * * *

LETTER 413.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, February 21. 1821.

“In the forty-fourth page, volume first, of Turner’s Travels (which you lately sent me), it is stated that ’Lord Byron, when he expressed such confidence of its practicability, seems to have forgotten that Leander swam both ways, with and against the tide; whereas he (Lord Byron) only performed the easiest part of the task by swimming with it from Europe to Asia.’  I certainly could not have forgotten, what is known to every schoolboy, that Leander crossed in the night and returned towards the morning.  My object was, to ascertain that the Hellespont could be crossed at all by swimming, and in this Mr. Ekenhead and myself both succeeded, the