"Jeffrey has sent me the most friendly of all possible letters, and has accepted * *'s article. He says he has long liked not only, &c. &c. but my 'character.' This must be your doing, you dog—ar'nt you ashamed of yourself, knowing me so well? This is what one gets for having you for a father confessor.
"I feel merry enough to send you a sad song.[72] You once asked me for some words which you would set. Now you may set or not, as you like,—but there they are, in a legible hand[73], and not in mine, but of my own scribbling; so you may say of them what you please. Why don't you write to me? I shall make you 'a speech'[74] if you don't respond quickly.
"I am in such a state of sameness and stagnation, and so totally occupied in consuming the fruits—and sauntering—and playing dull games at cards—and yawning—and trying to read old Annual Registers and the daily papers—and gathering shells on the shore—and watching the growth of stunted gooseberry bushes in the garden—that I have neither time nor sense to say more than yours ever, B.
"P.S. I open my letter again to put a question to you. What would Lady C——k, or any other fashionable Pidcock, give to collect you and Jeffrey and me to one party? I have been answering his letter, which suggested this dainty query. I can't help laughing at the thoughts of your face and mine; and our anxiety to keep the Aristarch in good humour during the early part of a compotation, till we got drunk enough to make him 'a speech.' I think the critic would have much the best of us—of one, at least—for I don't think diffidence (I mean social) is a disease of yours."
LETTER 217. TO MR. MOORE.
"March 8. 1815.
"An event—the death of poor Dorset—and the recollection of what I once felt, and ought to have felt now, but could not—set me pondering, and finally into the train of thought which you have in your hands. I am very glad you like them, for I flatter myself they will pass as an imitation of your style. If I could imitate it well, I should have no great ambition of originality—I wish I could make you exclaim with Dennis, 'That's my thunder, by G——d!' I wrote them with a view to your setting them, and as a present to Power, if he would accept the words, and you did not think yourself degraded, for once in a way, by marrying them to music.
"Sun-burn N * *!—why do you always twit me with his vile Ebrew nasalities? Have I not told you it was all K.'s doing, and my own exquisite facility of temper? But thou wilt be a wag, Thomas; and see what you get for it. Now for my revenge.