[315]: I told you before that I can never recast any thing. I am like the tiger. If I miss the first spring, I go grumbling to my jungle again. But if I do it, it is crushing.
[316]: I could not write upon any thing without some personal experience and foundation.
[317]: I am a great reader and admirer of those books (the Bible) 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.
[318]: As to Pope, I have always regarded him as the greatest man in our poetry. Depend upon it. The rest are barbarians. He is a Greek temple, with a gothic cathedral on one hand and a turkish mosque, and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, but I prefer the temple of Theseus or the Parthenon to a mountain of burnt brick-work.... The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean they are coarse, but shabby genteel.
[319]: All the styles of the day are bombastic. I don't except my own, no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language.
[320]: Voyez le pamphlet qu'il fit contre les lakistes.
[321]: On vendit du Corsaire 13000 exemplaires en un jour.
And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;
'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,
But pride congeal'd the drop within his ee:
Apart he stalk'd in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg'd he almost long'd for woe.