ing written to you again long
ago. Since I left England (and it is not for all the usual term of
transportation) I have scribbled to five hundred blockheads on
business, etc., without difficulty, tho with no great pleasure; and
yet, with the notion of addressing you a hundred times in my head, and
always in my heart, I have not done what I ought to have done. I can
only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with
which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree,
with whom one is enamored in good earnest; whereas we attack a
fresh-colored housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times)
any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.

I owe to you far more than usual obligation for the courtesies of
literature and common friendship; for you went out of your way in 1817
to do me a service, when it required not merely kindness, but courage
to do so; to have been recorded by you in such a manner would have
been a proud memorial at any time, but at such a time, when "all the
world and his wife," as the proverb goes, were trying to trample upon
me, was something still higher to my self-esteem--I allude to the
_Quarterly Review_ of the Third Canto of "Childe Harold," which Murray
told me was written by you--and, indeed, I should have known it
without his information, as there could not be two who could and would
have done this at the time. Had it been a common criticism, however
eloquent or panegyrical, I should have felt pleased, undoubtedly, and
grateful, but not to the extent which the extraordinary
good-heartedness of the whole proceeding must induce in any mind
capable of such sensations. The very tardiness of this acknowledgment
will, at least, show that I have not forgotten the obligation; and I
can assure you that my sense of it has been out at compound interest
during the delay. I shall only add one word upon the subject, which
is, that I think that you, and Jeffrey, and Leigh Hunt, were the only
literary men, of numbers whom I know (and some of whom I had served),
who dared venture even an anonymous word in my favor just then: and
that, of those three, I had never seen one at all--of the second much
less than I desired--and that the third was under no kind of
obligation to me whatever; while the other two had been actually
attacked by me on a former occasion; one, indeed, with some
provocation, but the other wantonly enough. So you see you have been
heap