ther to bewilder 'em,
Without remorse you set up 'Ilderim;'
So mind you don't get into debt,
Because as how, if you should fail,
These books would be but baddish bail.
And mind you do _not_ let escape
These rhymes to Morning Post or Perry,
Which would be _very_ treacherous--_very_,
And get me into such a scrape!
For, firstly, I should have to sally,
All in my little boat, against a _Gally_;
And, should I chance to slay the Assyrian wight,
Have next to combat with the female knight.

"You may show these matters to Moore and the select, but not to the
_profane_; and tell Moore, that I wonder he don't write to one now
and then."

[Footnote 132: Whenever a word or passage occurs (as in this instance)
which Lord Byron would have pronounced emphatically in speaking, it
appears, in his handwriting, as if written with something of the same
vehemence.]

[Footnote 133: Here follow the same rhymes ("I read the Christabel,"
&c.) which have already been given in one of his letters to myself.]

* * * * *

LETTER 269. TO MR. MOORE.

"Venice, March 31. 1817.

"You will begin to think my epistolary offerings (to whatever altar
you please to devote them) rather prodigal. But until you answer, I
shall not abate, because you deserve no better. I know you are
well, because I hear of your voyaging to London and the environs,
which I rejoice to learn, because your note alarmed me by the
purgation and phlebotomy therein prognosticated. I also hear of
your being in the press; all which, methinks, might have furnished
you with subject-matter for a middle-sized letter, considering that
I am in foreign parts, and that the last month's advertisements and
obituary would be absolute news to me from your Tramontane country.

"I told you, in my last, I have had a smart fever. There is an
epidemic in the place; but I suspect, from the symptoms, that mine
was a fever of my own, and had nothing in common with the low,
vulgar typhus, which is at this moment decimating Venice, and which
has half unpeopled Milan, if the accounts be true. This malady has
sorely discomfited my serving men, who want sadly to be gone away,
and get me to remove. But, besides my natural perversity, I was
seasoned in Turkey, by th