“I have written to you lately, both in prose and verse, at great length, to Paris and London. I presume that Mrs. Moore, or whoever is your Paris deputy, will forward my packets to you in London.
“I am setting off for Pisa if a slight incipient intermittent fever do not prevent me. I fear it is not strong enough to give Murray much chance of realizing his thirteens again. I hardly should regret it, I think, provided you raised your price upon him—as what Lady Holderness (my sister’s grandmother, a Dutchwoman) used to call Augusta, her Residee Legatoo—so as to provide for us all; my bones with a splendid and larmoyante edition, and you with double what is extractable during my lifetime.
“I have a strong presentiment that (bating some out of the way accident) you will survive me. The difference of eight years, or whatever it is, between our ages, is nothing. I do not feel (nor am, indeed, anxious to feel) the principle of life in me tend to longevity. My father and mother died, the one at thirty-five or six, and the other at forty-five; and Doctor Rush, or somebody else, says that nobody lives long, without having one parent, at least, an old stager.
“I should, to be sure, like to see out my eternal mother-in-law, not so much for her heritage, but from my natural antipathy. But the indulgence of this natural desire is too much to expect from the Providence who presides over old women. I bore you with all this about lives, because it has been put in my way by a calculation of insurances which Murray has sent me. I really think you should have more, if I evaporate within a reasonable time.
“I wonder if my ‘Cain’ has got safe to England. I have written since
about sixty stanzas of a poem, in octave stanzas (in the Pulci style, which the fools in England think was invented by Whistlecraft—it is
| 542 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1821. |
‘A Daniel come to judgment,
yea, a Daniel: I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word.’ |
“In this it is my intent to put the said George’s Apotheosis in a Whig point of view, not forgetting the Poet Laureate for his preface and his other demerits.
“I am just got to the pass where Saint Peter, hearing that the royal defunct had opposed Catholic Emancipation, rises up and, interrupting Satan’s oration, declares he will change places with Cerberus sooner than let him into heaven, while he has the keys thereof.
“I must go and ride, though rather feverish and chilly. It is the ague season; but the agues do me rather good than harm. The feel after the fit is as if one had got rid of one’s body for good and all.
“The gods go with you!—Address to Pisa.
“P.S. Since I came back I feel better, though I staid out too late for this malaria season, under the thin crescent of a very young moon, and got off my horse to walk in an avenue with a Signora for an hour. I thought of you and
‘When at eve thou rovest By the star thou lovest.’ |
