" 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.
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."
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