with a fellow in a carriage, who was impudent to my horse. I gave
him a swingeing box on the ear, which sent him to the police, who
dismissed his complaint. Witnesses had seen the transaction. He
first shouted, in an unseemly way, to frighten my palfry. I wheeled
round, rode up to the window, and asked him what he meant. He
grinned, and said some foolery, which produced him an immediate
slap in the face, to his utter discomfiture. Much blasphemy ensued,
and some menace, which I stopped by dismounting and opening the
carriage door, and intimating an intention of mending the road with
his immediate remains, if he did not hold his tongue. He held it.

"Monk Lewis is here--'how pleasant!'[5] He is a very good fellow,
and very much yours. So is Sam--so is every body--and amongst the
number,

"Yours ever,

"B.

"P.S. What think you of Manfred?"

[Footnote 5: An allusion (such as often occurs in these letters) to an
anecdote with which he had been amused.]

* * * * *

LETTER 290. TO MR. MURRAY.

"La Mira, near Venice, July 15. 1817.

"I have finished (that is, written--the file comes afterwards)
ninety and eight stanzas of the fourth Canto, which I mean to be
the concluding one. It will probably be about the same length as
the _third_, being already of the dimensions of the first or second
Cantos. I look upon parts of it as very good, that is, if the three
former are good, but this we shall see; and at any rate, good or
not, it is rather a different style from the last--less
metaphysical--which, at any rate, will be a variety. I sent you the
shaft of the column as a specimen the other day, _i.e._ the first
stanza. So you may be thinking of its arrival towards autumn, whose
winds will not be the only ones to be raised, _if so be as how
that_ it is ready by that time.

"I lent Lewis, who is at Venice, (in or on the Canalaccio, the
Grand Canal,) your extracts from Lalla Rookh and Manuel[6], and,
out of contradiction, it may be, he likes the last, and is not much
taken with the first, of these performances. Of Manuel, I think,
with the exception of a few capers, it is as heavy a nightmare as
was ever bestrode by indigestion.

"Of the extracts I can but judge as extracts, and I prefer the
'Peri' to the 'Silver