Believe me, yours ever,

BYRON.

“P.S.—­I shall most likely see you in the course of the summer, but, of course, at such a distance, I cannot specify any particular month.”  The voyage to Egypt, which he appears from this letter to have contemplated, was, probably for want of the expected remittances, relinquished; and, on the 3d of June, he set sail from Malta, in the Volage frigate, for England, having, during his short stay at Malta, suffered a severe attack of the tertian fever.  The feelings with which he returned home may be collected from the following melancholy letters.

LETTER 51.

TO MR. HODGSON.

“Volage frigate, at sea, June 29. 1811.

“In a week, with a fair wind, we shall be at Portsmouth, and on the 2d of July, I shall have completed (to a day) two years of peregrination, from which I am returning with as little emotion as I set out.  I think, upon the whole, I was more grieved at leaving Greece than England, which I am impatient to see, simply because I am tired of a long voyage.

“Indeed, my prospects are not very pleasant.  Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body a little enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit, I trust, yet unbroken, I am returning home without a hope, and almost without a desire.  The first thing I shall have to encounter will be a lawyer, the next a creditor, then colliers, farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair, and contested coal-pits.  In short, I am sick and sorry, and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence.

“I trust to meet, or see you, in town, or at Newstead, whenever you can make it convenient—­I suppose you are in love and in poetry as usual.  That husband, H. Drury, has never written to me, albeit I have sent him more than one letter;—­but I dare say the poor man has a family, and of course all his cares are confined to his circle.

    ’For children fresh expenses get,
    And Dicky now for school is fit.’

WARTON.

If you see him, tell him I have a letter for him from Tucker, a regimental chirurgeon and friend of his, who prescribed for me, ——­ and is a very worthy man, but too fond of hard words.  I should be too late for a speech-day, or I should probably go down to Harrow.  I regretted very much in Greece having omitted to carry the Anthology with me—­I mean Bland and Merivale’s.—­What has Sir Edgar done?  And the Imitations and Translations—­where are they?  I suppose you don’t mean to let the public off so easily, but charge them home with a quarto.  For me, I am ‘sick of fops, and poesy, and prate,’ and shall leave the ‘whole Castilian state’ to Bufo, or any body else.  But you are a sentimental and sensibilitous person, and will rhyme to the end of the chapter.  Howbeit, I have written some 4000 lines, of one kind or another, on my travels.