Hanno the Carthaginian,1 and with much the same speed. He is setting up a Journal, to which I have promised to contribute; and in the first number the Vision of Judgement, by Quevedo Redivivus, will probably appear, with other articles."

Can you give us any thing? He seems sanguine about the matter, but (entre nous) I am not. I do not, however, like to put him out of spirits by saying so; for he is bilious and unwell. Do, pray, answer this letter immediately.

Do send Hunt any thing in prose or verse of yours, to start him handsomely any lyrical, irical, or what you please.

1. The Tepínλous of Hanno the Carthaginian, originally written in the Punic language, and afterwards translated into Greek, was inscribed on a tablet in the Temple of Cronos at Carthage. Hanno was sent on a mission beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to found Libyphoenician towns. The Periplus was translated, and published with the Greek text, by the Rev. Thomas Falconer in 1797.

2. The following are the Contents of the first number of The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South. To be continued occasionally. No. I. (London, 1822. Price Five Shillings. Printed by and for John Hunt, 22, Old Bond Street) :

"Preface.

:

"The Vision of Judgment, by Quevedo Redivivus.

"A Letter to the Editor of 'My Grandmother's Review.' "The Florentine Lovers.

“Rhyme and Reason, being a new Proposal to the Public respecting Poetry in Ordinary.

"A German Apologue.

"Letters from Abroad, No. I.-A Description of Pisa.

"May-day Night; a Poetical Translation from Goethe's Faust.

"Ariosto's Episode of Cloridan, Medoro, and Angelica.

"The Country Maiden.

"Epigram of Alfieri.

"Epigrams on Lord Castlereagh."

"May-day Night" was contributed by Shelley; Byron wrote "The Vision," the "Letter" to the Editor of the British Review, and the "Epigrams on Lord Castlereagh."

No. I. of The Liberal was published October 15, 1822; No. II., January, 1823; No. III., April, 1823; No. IV., July, 1823. The "Preface to the Vision of Judgment withheld by Mr. Murray' (see p. 126, note 2), was published in a second edition of No. I.

VOL. VI.

H

Has not your Potatoe Committee been blundering? Your advertisement says, that Mr. L. Callaghan (a queer name for a banker) hath been disposing of money in Ireland sans authority of the Committee." I suppose it will end in Callaghan's calling out the Committee, the chairman of which carries pistols in his pocket, of course.

When you can spare time from duetting, coquetting, and claretting with your Hibernians of both sexes, let me have a line from you. I doubt whether Paris is a good place for the composition of your new poesy.

1017.-To John Murray.

Pisa, August 3d 1822.

DEAR SIR,-I have received your scrap with H. D[rury]'s letter enclosed. It is just like him: always kind and ready to oblige his old friends.

Will you have the goodness to send immediately to Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, and inform him that I have not received the remittances, due to me from the funds a month and more ago, and promised by him to be sent by every post, which omission is of great inconvenience to me, and indeed inexcusable as well as unintelligible. As I have written to him repeatedly, I suppose that his or my letters have miscarried.

I presume you have heard that Mr. Shelley and Capt. Williams were lost on the 7th Ulto in their passage from Leghorn to Spezia in their own open boat. You may

1. On the first of May, 1822, Shelley and his wife, with Edward and Jane Williams as their guests, took possession of Casa Magni, the house which they had hired for the summer, near the fishing village of San Terenzo, on the east side of the Gulf of Spezia. A few days later (May 12), Shelley's boat, originally called by Trelawny the Don Juan, but renamed by its owner the Ariel, arrived from Genoa. News came (July 1) that Hunt was at Pisa, and Shelley resolved to go and see him. That afternoon, taking

imagine the state of their families: I never saw such a scene, nor wish to see such another.

You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.

Yours ever,

N. B.

1018.-To Thomas Moore.

Pisa, August 8, 1822.

You will have heard by this time that Shelley and another gentleman (Captain Williams) were drowned about a month ago (a month yesterday), in a squall off the Gulf of Spezia. There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it.

I have not seen the thing you mention,1 and only

Roberts on board at Lerici, Shelley and Williams sailed in the Ariel for Leghorn, which they reached the same evening. From Tuesday to Sunday, July 2-7, Shelley was busy in helping Hunt to settle himself at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, arranging his affairs, showing him the sights of Pisa, and smoothing matters with Byron. Leaving Pisa on Sunday evening, he and Williams, with one hand, a lad named Charles Vivian, on board, sailed from Leghorn in the Ariel, at midday, Monday, July 8. Caught in a squall, or, as some suppose, run down by a felucca, accidentally or designedly, the Arid sank. The body of Shelley was washed ashore on the coast near Viareggio on July 18, and was recognized by Trelawny. The body of Williams was found a few hours earlier at no great distance. That of Vivian was discovered near Massa, also on the 18th (Trelawny, Records, etc., p. 309).

1. Memoirs, Historical and Critical, of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron, with Anecdotes of some of his Contemporaries. London, 1822, 80 The author of the book was John Watkins, LL.D., compiler of The Biographical Dictionary (1800), and the biographer of Sheridan (1816), and of H.M. Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain (1819).

heard of it casually, nor have I any desire. The price is, as I saw in some advertisements, fourteen shillings, which is too much to pay for a libel on oneself. Some one said in a letter, that it was a Dr. Watkins, who deals in the life and libel line. It must have diminished your natural pleasure, as a friend (vide Rochefoucault), to see yourself in it.1

With regard to the Blackwood fellows, I never pubblished any thing against them; nor, indeed, have seen their magazine (except in Galignani's extracts) for these three years past. I once wrote, a good while ago, some remarks on their review of Don Juan, but saying very little about themselves, and these were not published.3 If you think that I ought to follow your example (and I like to be in your company when I can) in contradicting their impudence, you may shape this declaration of mine

1. In Dr. Watkins's Memoirs (pp. 205-207) it is mentioned that Byron had attacked Moore's "poetical morality and personal 66 courage " in English Bards; that, in dedicating the Corsair to Moore, he was more profuse of his compliments than he had 66 even been of his sarcasms upon the melodious advocate of "lust;'" that, as a fresh proof of the intimate alliance between "the imitator of Juvenal" and "the modern Catullus," Byron had presented the "poet of lewdness" with his "Memoir of his own

life and times," etc. Towards the end of the volume (pp. 408410), Watkins charges Byron with forming "a poetical school of "immorality and profaneness" at Pisa; says that "we can most "gladly spare the worthies whom he has chosen as his co-adjutors "in this great concern;" and suggests that England would profit, "if to the Shelleys and the Hunts, who are to be the professors in "this new academy of blasphemy, the noble president shall be "pleased to add a score or two more of the same kind."

2. The Preface to vol. xi. of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (January-June, 1822), dated June 20, 1822, says (p. vii.), "Mr. "Thomas Moore, we happen to know, has written a Satirical Poem "upon us and our Magazine; but it is not yet published," etc. "Lord Byron, too, has written," it continues (p. viii.), "something "about us-but whether a satire or an eulogy seems doubtful. (For the rest of the quotation, see Letters, vol. v. p. 539, and note 2.)

3. See Letters, vol. iv. Appendix IX.

into a similar paragraph for me. It is possible that you may have seen the little I did write (and never published) at Murray's it contained much more about Southey than about the Blacks.

If you think that I ought to do any thing about Watkins's book, I should not care much about publishing my Memoir now, should it be necessary to counteract the fellow. But, in that case, I should like to look over the press myself. Let me know what you think, or whether I had better not:-at least, not the second part, which touches on the actual confines of still existing

matters.

I have written three more cantos of Don Juan, and am hovering on the brink of another (the ninth). The reason I want the stanzas again which I sent you is, that as these cantos contain a full detail (like the storm in Canto Second) of the siege and assault of Ismael,1 with much of sarcasm on those butchers in large business, your mercenary soldiery, it is a good opportunity of gracing the poem with * * *. With these things and these fellows, it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it is against fearful odds; but the battle must be fought; and it will be eventually for the good of mankind, whatever it may be for the individual who risks. himself.

What do you think of your Irish bishop? Do you remember Swift's line, "Let me have a barrack—a fig for

1. Don Juan, Canto VIII., describes the storming of Ismail in Bessarabia by the Russians under Suwarrow (December 22, 1790). According to the Histoire de la nouvelle Russie (tom. iii. p. 214), 38,860 Turks were put to the sword.

2. The Hon. Percy Jocelyn (1764-1843), made Bishop of Clogher in 1820, was in 1822 "deposed on account of a scandalous crime." The particeps criminis was a soldier named Moverly (Rivington's Annual Register for 1822, pp. 252*-266*).