“I have to thank you for your letter, and your compliment to Don Juan. I said nothing to you about it, understanding that it is a sore subject with the moral reader, and has been the cause of a great row; but I am glad you like it. I will say nothing about the shipwreck, except that I hope you think it is as nautical and technical as verse could admit in the octave measure.
“The poem has not sold well, so Murray says—‘but the best judges, &c. say, &c.’ so says that worthy man. I have never seen it in print. The Third Canto is in advance about one hundred stanzas; but the failure of the two first has weakened my estro, and it will neither be so good as the two former, nor completed, unless I get a little more riscaldato in its behalf. I understand the outcry was beyond every thing.—Pretty cant for people who read Tom Jones, and Roderick Random, and the Bath Guide, and Ariosto, and Dryden, and Pope—to say nothing of Little’s Poems. Of course I refer to the morality of these works, and not to any pretension of mine to compete with them in any thing but decency. I hope yours is the Paris edition, and that you did not pay the London price. I have seen neither except in the newspapers.
“Pray make my respects to Mrs.
H., and take care of your little boy. All my household have the fever and
ague, except Fletcher, Allegra, and mysen (as we used to
say in Nottinghamshire), and the horses, and Mutz, and
Moretto. In the beginning of November, perhaps sooner, I expect
to have the pleasure of seeing you. To-day I got drenched by a thunder-storm, and my
horse and groom too, and his horse all bemired up to the middle in a cross-road. It was
summer at noon, and at five we were be-wintered; but the lightning was sent perhaps to
| A. D. 1819. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 279 |
