, in six small tomes. I am really taking a liberty by talking
in this style to my 'elders and my betters;'--pardon it, and don't
_Rochefoucault_ my motives."

[Footnote 79: The Ode of Horace,

"Natis in usum laetitiae," &c.;

some passages of which I told him might be parodied, in allusion to some
of his late adventures:

"Quanta laboras in Charybdi!
Digne puer meliore flamma!"
]

[Footnote 80: In his first edition of The Giaour he had used this word
as a trisyllable,--"Bright as the gem of Giamschid,"--but on my
remarking to him, upon the authority of Richardson's Persian Dictionary,
that this was incorrect, he altered it to "Bright as the ruby of
Giamschid." On seeing this, however, I wrote to him, "that, as the
comparison of his heroine's eye to a 'ruby' might unluckily call up the
idea of its being blood-shot, he had better change the line to "Bright
as the jewel of Giamschid;"--which he accordingly did in the following
edition.]

[Footnote 81: Having already endeavoured to obviate the charge of
vanity, to which I am aware I expose myself by being thus accessory to
the publication of eulogies, so warm and so little merited, on myself, I
shall here only add, that it will abundantly console me under such a
charge, if, in whatever degree the judgment of my noble friend may be
called in question for these praises, he shall, in the same proportion,
receive credit for the good-nature and warm-heartedness by which they
were dictated.]

[Footnote 82: I had already, singularly enough, anticipated this
suggestion, by making the daughter of a Peri the heroine of one of my
stories, and detailing the love adventures of her aerial parent in an
episode. In acquainting Lord Byron with this circumstance, in my answer
to the above letter, I added, "All I ask of your friendship is--not that
you will abstain from Peris on my account, for that is too much to ask
of human (or, at least, author's) nature--but that, whenever you mean to
pay your addresses to any of these aerial ladies, you will, at once,
tell me so, frankly and instantly, and let me, at least, have my choice
whether I shall be desperate enough to go on, with such a rival, or at
once surrender the whole race into your hands, and take, for the future,
to Antediluvians with Mr. Montgomery."]

* * * * *

LETTER 135. TO MR. MOORE.

"August--September, I mean--1. 1813.

"I send you, begging your accep