y own exceedingly.

"I have read 'Lalla Rookh,' but not with sufficient attention yet,
for I ride about, and lounge, and ponder, and--two or three other
things; so that my reading is very desultory, and not so attentive
as it used to be. I am very glad to hear of its popularity, for
Moore is a very noble fellow in all respects, and will enjoy it
without any of the bad feelings which success--good or
evil--sometimes engenders in the men of rhyme. Of the poem, itself,
I will tell you my opinion when I have mastered it: I say of the
_poem_, for I don't like the _prose_ at all; and in the mean time,
the 'Fire-worshippers' is the best, and the 'Veiled Prophet' the
worst, of the volume.

"With regard to poetry in general[9], I am convinced, the more I
think of it, that he and _all_ of us--Scott, Southey, Wordsworth,
Moore, Campbell, I,--are all in the wrong, one as much as another;
that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems,
not worth a damn in itself, and from which none but Rogers and
Crabbe are free; and that the present and next generations will
finally be of this opinion. I am the more confirmed in this by
having lately gone over some of our classics, particularly _Pope_,
whom I tried in this way,--I took Moore's poems and my own and some
others, and went over them side by side with Pope's, and I was
really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified at
the ineffable distance in point of sense, learning, effect, and
even _imagination_, passion, and _invention_, between the little
Queen Anne's man, and us of the Lower Empire. Depend upon it, it is
all Horace then, and Claudian now, among us; and if I had to begin
again, I would mould myself accordingly. Crabbe's the man, but he
has got a coarse and impracticable subject, and * * * is retired
upon half-pay, and has done enough, unless he were to do as he did
formerly."

[Footnote 9: On this paragraph, in the MS. copy of the above letter, I
find the following note, in the handwriting of Mr. Gifford:--

"There is more good sense, and feeling, and judgment in this passage,
than in any other I ever read, or Lord Byron wrote."]

* * * * *

LETTER 298. TO MR. MURRAY.

"September 17. 1817.

"Mr. Hobhouse purposes being in England in November; he wil