"Yours,
"B."
LETTER 435. TO MR. MOORE.
"Ravenna, June 22. 1821.
"Your dwarf of a letter came yesterday. That is right;—keep to your 'magnum opus '—magnoperate away. Now, if we were but together a little to combine our 'Journal of Trevoux!' But it is useless to sigh, and yet very natural,—for I think you and I draw better together, in the social line, than any two other living authors.
"I forgot to ask you, if you had seen your own panegyric in the correspondence of Mrs. Waterhouse and Colonel Berkeley? To be sure their moral is not quite exact; but your passion is fully effective; and all poetry of the Asiatic kind—I mean Asiatic, as the Romans called Asiatic oratory,' and not because the scenery is Oriental—must be tried by that test only. I am not quite sure that I shall allow the Miss Byrons (legitimate or illegitimate) to read Lalla Rookh—in the first place, on account of this said passion; and, in the second, that they mayn't discover that there was a better poet than papa.
"You say nothing of politics—but, alas! what can be said?
"The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull,
Each tugs it a different way,—
And the greatest of all is John Bull!