In a week, with a fair wind, we shall be at Portsmouth, and
on the 2nd of July I shall have completed (to a day) two years of
peregrination, from which I am returning with as little emotion as I set out. I
think, upon the whole, I was more grieved at leaving Greece than England, which
I am impatient to see, simply because I am tired of a long voyage. Indeed, my
prospects are not very pleasant. Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent
to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body a little
enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit, I trust, yet unbroken, I am
returning home without a hope, and almost without a desire. The first thing I
shall have to encounter will be a lawyer; the next a creditor; then colliers,
farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair,
FRIENDLY INTEREST OF BYRON. 177
I trust to meet or see you, in town, or at Newstead,
whenever you can make it convenient. I suppose you are in love and poetry as
usual. That husband, H. Drury, has never
written to me, albeit I have sent him more than one letter; but I daresay the
poor man has a family, and of course all his cares are confined to his circle.
I regretted very much in Greece having omitted to carry the ‘Anthology’ with me.
What has ‘Sir
Edgar’ done? And the ‘Imitations and Translations;’
where are they? I suppose you don’t mean to let the public off so easily,
but charge them home with a quarto. For me, I am sick of ‘fops, and
poesy, and prate,’ and shall leave ‘the whole Castalian
state’ to Bufo, or anybody
else. But you are a sentimental and sensibilitous person, and will rhyme to the
end of the chapter. Howbeit I have written some 4,000 lines, of one kind or
another, on my travels. I need not repeat that I shall be happy to see you. I
shall be in town about the
| 178 | MEMOIR OF REV. F. HODGSON. |
