“You will have had enough of my letters by this time—yet one word in answer to your present missive. You are quite wrong in thinking that your ‘advice’ had offended me; but I have already replied (if not answered) on that point.
“With regard to Murray, as I really am the meekest and mildest of men since Moses (though the public and mine ‘excellent wife’ cannot find it out), I had already pacified myself and subsided back to Albemarle-street, as my yesterday’s yepistle will have informed you. But I thought that I had explained my causes of bile—at least to you. Some instances of vacillation, occasional neglect, and troublesome sincerity, real or imagined, are sufficient to put your truly great author and man into a passion. But reflection, with some aid from hellebore, hath already cured me ‘pro tempore;’ and, if it had not, a request from you and Hobhouse would have come upon me like two out of the ’tribus Anticyris,’—with which, however, Horace despairs of purging a poet. I really feel ashamed of having bored you so frequently and fully of late. But what could I do? You are a friend—an absent one, alas!—and as I trust no one more, I trouble you in proportion.
“This war of ‘Church and State’ has astonished
me more than it disturbs; for I really thought ‘Cain’ a speculative and hardy, but still a harmless,
production. As I said before, I am really a great admirer of tangible religion; and am
breeding one of my daughters a Catholic, that
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“I am afraid that this sounds flippant, but I don’t mean it to be so; only my turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then. Still, I do assure you that I am a very good Christian. Whether you will believe me in this, I do not know; but I trust you will take my word for being
“P.S. Do tell Murray that one of the conditions of peace is, that he publisheth (or obtaineth a publisher for) * * *’s Commentary on Dante, against which there appears in the trade an unaccountable repugnance. It will make the man so exuberantly happy. He dines with me and half a dozen English to-day; and I have not the heart to tell him how the bibliopolar world shrink from his Commentary;—and yet it is full of the most orthodox religion and morality. In short, I make it a point that he shall be in print. He is such a good-natured, heavy-* * Christian, that we must give him a shove through the press. He naturally thirsts to be an author, and has been the happiest of men for these two months, printing, correcting, collating, dating, anticipating, and adding to his treasures of learning. Besides, he has had another fall from his horse into a ditch the other day, while riding out with me into the country.”
