In the late spring or early summer of 1813, Byron and Moore supped on bread and cheese with Rogers. Their host had just received from Lord Thurlow a copy of his
Poems on Several Occasions
(1813), and, in spite of protests by Rogers, Byron and Moore, in wild spirits, hunted through the volume to find absurdities. Byron lighted upon some lines to Rogers himself, "On the Poem of Mr. Rogers entitled 'An Epistle to a Friend.'" The first stanza ran thus:
"When Rogers o'er this labour bent,
Their purest fire the Muses lent,
T' illustrate this sweet argument."
But when he began to read them aloud, he could not, for laughing, get beyond the first two words. Two or three times he tried, but always broke down, till he was joined by Moore in a fit of laughter which at last infected Rogers himself. The three were, as Moore tells the story,
"in such a state of inextinguishable laughter, that, had the author himself been of the party, I question much whether he could have resisted the infection."
A day or two afterwards, Byron sent Moore the lines given in Letter 295. On the same day he again returned to the subject, with the following additional lines, in which the last stanza of the same poem is the text:
"Then, thus, to form Apollo's crown,
(Let ev'ry other bring his own,)
I lay my branch of laurel down."
"To