MY DEAR SIR WALTER--I need not say how grateful I am for your letter,
but I must own my ingratitude in not having written to you again long
ago. Since I left England (and it is not for all the usual term of
transportation) I have scribbled to five hundred blockheads on
business, etc., without difficulty, tho with no great pleasure; and
yet, with the notion of addressing you a hundred times in my head, and
always in my heart, I have not done what I ought to have done. I can
only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with
which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree,
with whom one is enamored in good earnest; whereas we attack a
fresh-colored housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times)
any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.
I owe to you far more than usual obligation for the courtesies of
literature and common friendship; for you went out of your way in 1817
to do me a service, when it required not merely kindness, but courage
to do so; to have been recorded by you in such a manner would have
been a proud memorial at any time, but at such a time, when "all the
world and his wife," as the proverb goes, were trying to trample upon
me, was something still higher to my self-esteem--I allude to the
_Quarterly Review_ of the Third Canto of "Childe Harold," which Murray
told me was written by you--and, indeed, I should have known it
without his information, as there could not be two who could and would
have done this at the time. Had it been a common criticism, however
eloquent or panegyrical, I should have felt pleased, undoubtedly, and
grateful, but not to the extent which the extraordinary
good-heartedness of the whole proceeding must induce in any mind
capable of such sensations. The very tardiness of this acknowledgment
will, at least, show that I have not forgotten the obligation; and I
can assure you that my sense of it has been out at compound interest
during the delay. I shall only add one word upon the subject, which
is, that I think that you, and Jeffrey, and Leigh Hunt, were the only
literary men, of numbers whom I know (and some of whom I had served),
who dared venture even an anonymous word in my favor just then: and
that, of those three, I had never seen one at all--of the second much
less than I desired--and that the third was under no kind of
obligation to me whatever; while the other two had been actually
attacked by me on a former occasion; one, indeed, with some
provocation, but the other wantonly enough. So you see you have been
heaping "coals of fire," etc., in the true gospel manner, and I can
assure you that they have burned down to my very heart.
I am glad you accepted the Inscription.[33] I meant to have inscribed
"The Foscarini" to you instead; but, first, I heard that "Cain" was
thought the least bad of the two as a composition; and, secondly, I
have abused Southey like a pickpocket, in a note to "The Foscarini,"
and I recollected that he is a friend of yours (tho not of mine), and
that it would not be the handsome thing to dedicate to one friend
anything containing such matters about another. However, I'll work the
Laureate before I have done therefor. I like a row, and always did
from a boy, in the course of which propensity, I must needs say, that
I have found it the most easy of all to be gratified, personally and
poetically. You disclaim "jealousies"; but I would ask, as Boswell did
of Johnson, "of whom could you be jealous?"--of none of the living
certainly, and (taking all and all into consideration) of which of the
dead? I don't like to bore you about the Scotch novels (as they call
them, tho two of them are wholly English, and the rest half so), but
nothing can or could ever persuade me, since I was the first ten
minutes in your company, that you are not the man. To me those novels
have so much of "Auld lang syne" (I was bred a canny Scot till ten
years old), that I never move without them; and when I removed from
Ravenna to Pisa the other day, and sent on my library before, they
were the only books that I kept by me, altho I already have them by
heart.