"September 26. 1812.
"You will think there is no end to my villanous emendations. The
fifth and sixth lines I think to alter thus:--
"Ye who beheld--oh sight admired and mourn'd,
Whose radiance mock'd the ruin it adorn'd;
because 'night' is repeated the next line but one; and, as it now
stands, the conclusion of the paragraph, 'worthy him (Shakspeare)
and _you_,' appears to apply the '_you_' to those only who were out
of bed and in Covent Garden Market on the night of conflagration,
instead of the audience or the discerning public at large, all of
whom are intended to be comprised in that comprehensive and, I
hope, comprehensible pronoun.
"By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent yesterday
has dived into the bathos some sixty fathom--
"When Garrick died, and Brinsley ceased to write.
Ceasing to _live_ is a much more serious concern, and ought not to
be first; therefore I will let the old couplet stand, with its half
rhymes 'sought' and 'wrote.'[51] Second thoughts in every thing are
best, but, in rhyme, third and fourth don't come amiss. I am very
anxious on this business, and I do hope that the very trouble I
occasion you will plead its own excuse, and that it will tend to
show my endeavour to make the most of the time allotted. I wish I
had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line
standing on another. I always scrawl in this way, and smooth as
much as I can, but never sufficiently; and, latterly, I can weave a
nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have
not the cunning. When I began 'Childe Harold,' I had never tried
Spenser's measure, and now I cannot scribble in any other.
"After all, my dear Lord, if you can get a decent Address
elsewhere, don't hesitate to put this aside. Why did you not trust
your own Muse? I am very sure she would have been triumphant, and
saved the Committee their trouble--''tis a joyful one' to me, but I
fear I shall not satisfy even myself. After the account you sent
me, 'tis no compliment to say you would have beaten your
candidates; but I mean that, in _that_ case, there would have been
no occasion for their being beaten at all.
"There are but two decent prologues in our tongue--Pope's to
Cato--Johnson's to Drury Lane. These, with the epilogue to the
'Distrest Mother,' and, I think, one of Goldsmith's, and a prologue
of old Colman's to Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, are the best
things of the kind we have.
"P.S.--I am diluted to the throat with medicine for the stone; and
Boisragon wants me to try a warm climate for the winter--but I
won't."
[Footnote 51:
"Such are the names that here your plaudits sought,
When Garrick acted, and when Brinsley wrote."