ther hand, my dear fellow, depend upon it your abuse is
worth, not its own weight, that's a feather, but _your_ weight in
gold. So don't spare it; if he has bargained for _that_, give it
handsomely, and depend upon your doing him a friendly office.

"What the motives of this writer may have been for (as you
magnificently translate his quizzing you) 'stating, with the
particularity which belongs to fact, the forgery of a groundless
fiction,' (do, pray, my dear R., talk a little less 'in King
Cambyses' vein,') I cannot pretend to say; perhaps to laugh at you,
but that is no reason for your benevolently making all the world
laugh also. I approve of your being angry, I tell you I am angry
too, but you should not have shown it so outrageously. Your solemn
'_if_ somebody personating the Editor of the, &c. &c. has received
from Lord B. or from any other person,' reminds me of Charley
Incledon's usual exordium when people came into the tavern to hear
him sing without paying their share of the reckoning--'if a maun,
or _ony_ maun, or _ony other_ maun,' &c. &c.; you have both the
same redundant eloquence. But why should you think any body would
personate you? Nobody would dream of such a prank who ever read
your compositions, and perhaps not many who have heard your
conversation. But I have been inoculated with a little of your
prolixity. The fact is, my dear R----ts, that somebody has tried to
make a fool of you, and what he did not succeed in doing, you have
done for him and for yourself."

* * * * *

Towards the latter end of August, Count Guiccioli, accompanied by his
lady, went for a short time to visit some of his Romagnese estates,
while Lord Byron remained at Bologna alone. And here, with a heart
softened and excited by the new feeling that had taken possession of
him, he appears to have given himself up, during this interval of
solitude, to a train of melancholy and impassioned thought, such as, for
a time, brought back all the romance of his youthful days. That spring
of natural tenderness within his soul, which neither the world's efforts
nor his own had been able to chill or choke up, was now, with something
of its first freshness, set flowing once more. He again knew what it was
to love and be loved,--too late, it is true, for happiness, and too
wrongly for peace, but wit