"August 12. 1814.
"I was _not_ alone, nor will be while I can help it. Newstead is
not yet decided. Claughton is to make a grand effort by Saturday
week to complete,--if not, he must give up twenty-five thousand
pounds and the estate, with expenses, &c. &c. If I resume the
Abbacy, you shall have due notice, and a cell set apart for your
reception, with a pious welcome. Rogers I have not seen, but Larry
and Jacky came out a few days ago. Of their effect I know nothing.
"There is something very amusing in _your_ being an Edinburgh
Reviewer. You know, I suppose, that T * * is none of the placidest,
and may possibly enact some tragedy on being told that he is only a
fool. If, now, Jeffery were to be slain on account of an article of
yours, there would be a fine conclusion. For my part, as Mrs.
Winifred Jenkins says, 'he has done the handsome thing by me,'
particularly in his last number; so, he is the best of men and the
ablest of critics, and I won't have him killed,--though I dare say
many wish he were, for being so good-humoured.
"Before I left Hastings I got in a passion with an ink bottle,
which I flung out of the window one night with a vengeance;--and
what then? Why, next morning I was horrified by seeing that it had
struck, and split upon, the petticoat of Euterpe's graven image in
the garden, and grimed her as if it were on purpose[45]. Only think
of my distress,--and the epigrams that might be engendered on the
Muse and her misadventure.
"I had an adventure almost as ridiculous, at some private
theatricals near Cambridge--though of a different
description--since I saw you last. I quarrelled with a man in the
dark for asking me who I was (insolently enough to be sure), and
followed him into the green-room (a _stable_) in a rage, amongst a
set of people I never saw before. He turned out to be a low
comedian, engaged to act with the amateurs, and to be a
civil-spoken man enough, when he found out that nothing very
pleasant was to be got by rudeness. But you would have been amused
with the row, and the dialogue, and the dress--or rather the
undress--of the party, where I had introduced myself in a devil of
a hurry, and the astonishment that ensued. I had gone out of the
theatre, for coolness, into the garden;--there I had tumbled over
some dogs, and, coming away from them in very ill humour,
encountered the man in a worse, which produced all this confusion.
"Well--and why don't you 'launch?'--Now is your time. The people
are tolerably tired with me, and not very much enamoured of * *,
who has just spawned a quarto of metaphysical blank verse, which is
nevertheless only a part of a poem.
"Murray talks of divorcing Larry and Jacky--a bad sign for the
authors, who, I suppose, will be divorced too, and throw the blame
upon one another. Seriously, I don't care a cigar about it, and I
don't see why Sam should.
"Let me hear from and of you and my godson. If a daughter, the
name will do quite as well.
"Ever," &c.
[Footnote 45: His servant had brought him up a large jar of ink, into
which, not supposing it to be full, he had thrust his pen down to the
very bottom. Enraged, on finding it come out all smeared with ink, he
flung the bottle out of the window into the garden, where it lighted, as
here described, upon one of eight leaden Muses, that had been imported,
some time before, from Holland,--the ninth having been, by some
accident, left behind.]
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