"August 28. 1813.
"Ay, my dear Moore, 'there _was_ a time'--I have heard of your
tricks, when 'you was campaigning at the King of Bohemy.' I am much
mistaken if, some fine London spring, about the year 1815, that
time does not come again. After all, we must end in marriage; and I
can conceive nothing more delightful than such a state in the
country, reading the county newspaper, &c., and kissing one's
wife's maid. Seriously, I would incorporate with any woman of
decent demeanour to-morrow--that is, I would a month ago, but, at
present, * * *
"Why don't you 'parody that Ode?'[79]--Do you think I should be
_tetchy?_ or have you done it, and won't tell me?--You are quite
right about Giamschid, and I have reduced it to a dissyllable
within this half hour.[80] I am glad to hear you talk of
Richardson, because it tells me what you won't--that you are going
to beat Lucien. At least tell me how far you have proceeded. Do you
think me less interested about your works, or less sincere than our
friend Ruggiero? I am not--and never was. In that thing of mine,
the 'English Bards,' at the time when I was angry with all the
world, I never 'disparaged your parts,' although I did not know you
personally;--and have always regretted that you don't give us an
_entire_ work, and not sprinkle yourself in detached
pieces--beautiful, I allow, and quite _alone_ in our language[81],
but still giving us a right to expect a _Shah Nameh_ (is that the
name?) as well as gazels. Stick to the East;--the oracle, Staël,
told me it was the only poetical policy. The North, South, and
West, have all been exhausted; but from the East, we have nothing
but S * *'s unsaleables,--and these he has contrived to spoil, by
adopting only their most outrageous fictions. His personages don't
interest us, and yours will. You will have no competitor; and, if
you had, you ought to be glad of it. The little I have done in that
way is merely a 'voice in the wilderness' for you; and if it has
had any success, that also will prove that the public are
orientalising, and pave the path for you.
"I have been thinking of a story, grafted on the amours of a Peri
and a mortal--something like, only more _philanthropical_ than,
Cazotte's Diable Amoureux. It would require a good deal of poesy,
and tenderness is not my forte. For that, and other reasons, I have
given up the idea, and merely suggest it to you, because, in
intervals of your greater work, I think it a subject you might make
much of.[82] If you want any more books, there is 'Castellan's
Moeurs des Ottomans,' the best compendium of the kind I ever met
with, in six small tomes. I am really taking a liberty by talking
in this style to my 'elders and my betters;'--pardon it, and don't
_Rochefoucault_ my motives."
[Footnote 79: The Ode of Horace,
"Natis in usum lætitiæ," &c.;
some passages of which I told him might be parodied, in allusion to some
of his late adventures:
"Quanta laboras in Charybdi!
Digne puer meliore flammâ!"
]
[Footnote 80: In his first edition of The Giaour he had used this word
as a trisyllable,--"Bright as the gem of Giamschid,"--but on my
remarking to him, upon the authority of Richardson's Persian Dictionary,
that this was incorrect, he altered it to "Bright as the ruby of
Giamschid." On seeing this, however, I wrote to him, "that, as the
comparison of his heroine's eye to a 'ruby' might unluckily call up the
idea of its being blood-shot, he had better change the line to "Bright
as the jewel of Giamschid;"--which he accordingly did in the following
edition.]
[Footnote 81: Having already endeavoured to obviate the charge of
vanity, to which I am aware I expose myself by being thus accessory to
the publication of eulogies, so warm and so little merited, on myself, I
shall here only add, that it will abundantly console me under such a
charge, if, in whatever degree the judgment of my noble friend may be
called in question for these praises, he shall, in the same proportion,
receive credit for the good-nature and warm-heartedness by which they
were dictated.]
[Footnote 82: I had already, singularly enough, anticipated this
suggestion, by making the daughter of a Peri the heroine of one of my
stories, and detailing the love adventures of her aërial parent in an
episode. In acquainting Lord Byron with this circumstance, in my answer
to the above letter, I added, "All I ask of your friendship is--not that
you will abstain from Peris on my account, for that is too much to ask
of human (or, at least, author's) nature--but that, whenever you mean to
pay your addresses to any of these aërial ladies, you will, at once,
tell me so, frankly and instantly, and let me, at least, have my choice
whether I shall be desperate enough to go on, with such a rival, or at
once surrender the whole race into your hands, and take, for the future,
to Antediluvians with Mr. Montgomery."]
* * * * *