‘Dear Rogers,—Where are you during this pleasant autumnal weather? Not on the warm sunny bend close to the old colonnades, as I wish you were, and hope you will be before Parliament meets. We then go to St. James’s Square. You cannot conceive how much I have missed you, both at your “accustomed bench” and elsewhere, and how sincerely I hope you will repay us for the time we have lost.
‘I am almost ashamed of having induced Lord Byron to write on so ungrateful a theme (ungrateful in all senses) as the opening of a theatre; he was so good-humoured, took so much pains, corrected so good-humouredly, and produced, as I thought and think, a prologue so very much superior to the common run of that sort of trumpery, that it is quite vexatious to see him attacked for it. Some part of it is a little too much laboured, and the whole too long, but surely it is good and poetical. What do you think of Busby? Does not his conduct exceed all that satirists have ever described of the extravagance of men smit with the love of their own verses? You cannot imagine how I grew to like Lord Byron in my critical intercourse with him, and how much I am convinced that your friendship and judgment have contributed to improve both his understanding and his happiness.
‘Lady H. has been very ill, but is better. She begs her best love, and I am, my dear Rogers,
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‘P.S. We shan’t lose much, and the Ministers will gain still less, by the dissolution. What a horrible campaign in Russia! and what a wretch that Rostopschin is!”
