“Since I last wrote to you, much has occurred, good, bad, and indifferent,—not to make me forget you, but to prevent me from reminding you of one who, nevertheless, has often thought of you, and to whom your thoughts, in many a measure, have frequently been a consolation. We were once very near neighbours this autumn; and a good and bad neighbourhood it has proved to me. Suffice it to say, that your French quotation was confoundedly to the purpose,—though very unexpectedly pertinent, as you may imagine by what I said before, and my silence since. * * * * * * * * * * However, ‘Richard’s himself again,’ and, except all night and some part of the morning, I don’t think very much about the matter.
“All convulsions end with me in rhyme; and, to solace my midnights, I have scribbled another Turkish story†—not a Fragment—which you will receive soon after this. It does not trench upon your kingdom in the least, and, if it did, you would soon reduce me to my proper boundaries. You will think, and justly, that I run some risk of losing the little I have gained in fame, by this further experiment on public patience; but I have really ceased to care on that head. I have written this, and published it, for the sake of the employment,—to wring my thoughts from reality, and take refuge in ‘imaginings,’ however
* The motto to the Giaour, which is taken from one of the Irish Melodies, had been quoted by him incorrectly in the first editions of the Poem. He made afterwards a similar mistake in the lines from Burns prefixed to the Bride of Abydos. |
† The Bride of Abydos. |
| 432 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1813. |
“P.S. Ward and I talk of going to Holland. I want to see how a Dutch canal looks, after the Bosphorus. Pray respond.”
