en more diverted
than I was with his happy ridicule of "the gentleman in asterisks,"
little thinking that I was myself, all the while, this veiled
victim,--nor was it till about the time of the receipt of the above
letter, that, by some communication on the subject from a friend in
England, I was startled into the recollection of my own share in the
transaction.

While by one friend I was thus unconsciously, if not innocently, drawn
into the scrape, the other was not slow in rendering me the same
friendly service;--for, on the appearance of Lord Byron's answer to Mr.
Bowles, I had the mortification of finding that, with a far less
pardonable want of reserve, he had all but named me as his authority for
an anecdote of his reverend opponent's early days, which I had, in the
course of an after-dinner conversation, told him at Venice, and
which,--pleasant in itself, and, whether true or false,
harmless,--derived its sole sting from the manner in which the noble
disputant triumphantly applied it. Such are the consequences of one's
near and dear friends taking to controversy.]

* * * * *

LETTER 435. TO MR. MOORE.

"Ravenna, June 22. 1821.

"Your dwarf of a letter came yesterday. That is right;--keep to
your 'magnum opus '--magnoperate away. Now, if we were but together
a little to combine our 'Journal of Trevoux!' But it is useless to
sigh, and yet very natural,--for I think you and I draw better
together, in the social line, than any two other living authors.

"I forgot to ask you, if you had seen your own panegyric in the
correspondence of Mrs. Waterhouse and Colonel Berkeley? To be sure
_their_ moral is not quite exact; but _your passion_ is fully
effective; and all poetry of the Asiatic kind--I mean Asiatic, as
the Romans called _Asiatic_ oratory,' and not because the scenery
is Oriental--must be tried by that test only. I am not quite sure
that I shall allow the Miss Byrons (legitimate or illegitimate) to
read Lalla Rookh--in the first place, on account of this said
_passion_; and, in the second, that they mayn't discover that there
was a better poet than papa.

"You say nothing of politics--but, alas! what can be said?

"The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull,
Each tugs it a different way,--
And the greatest of all is John Bull!