"By the way, you have a good deal of my prose tracts in MS.? Let me have proofs of them all again—I mean the controversial ones, including the last two or three years of time. Another question!—The Epistle of St. Paul, which I translated from the Armenian, for what reason have you kept it back, though you published that stuff which gave rise to the 'Vampire?' Is it because you are afraid to print any thing in opposition to the cant of the Quarterly about Manicheism? Let me have a proof of that Epistle directly. I am a better Christian than those parsons of yours, though not paid for being so.
"Send—Faber's Treatise on the Cabiri.
"Sainte Croix's Mystères du Paganisme (scarce, perhaps, but to be found, as Mitford refers to his work frequently).
"A common Bible, of a good legible print (bound in russia). I have one; but as it was the last gift of my sister (whom I shall probably never see again), I can only use it carefully, and less frequently, because I like to keep it in good order. Don't forget this, for I am a great reader and admirer of those books, and had read them through and through before I was eight years old,—that is to say, the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task, but the other as a pleasure. I speak as a boy, from the recollected impression of that period at Aberdeen in 1796.
"Any novels of Scott, or poetry of the same. Ditto of Crabbe, Moore, and the Elect; but none of your curst common-place trash,—unless something starts up of actual merit, which may very well be, for 'tis time it should."
LETTER 463. TO MR. MURRAY.
"October 20. 1821.
"If the errors are in the MS. write me down an ass: they are not, and I am content to undergo any penalty if they be. Besides, the omitted stanza (last but one or two), sent afterwards, was that in the MS. too?