a fame which can not be shaken, is the only poet of the
times (except Rogers) who can be reproached (and in him it is indeed a
reproach) with having written too little."

Hereupon he writes to Murray, half joking, half serious:--

"Murray, my dear, make my respects to Thomas Campbell, and tell him from
me, with faith and friendship, three things that he must right in his
'Poets.' First, he says Anstey's 'Bath Guide' characters are taken from
Smollett. 'Tis impossible: the 'Guide' was published in 1766, and
'Humphry Clinker' in 1771--_dunque_, 'tis Smollett who has taken from
Anstey. Secondly, he does not know to whom Cowper alludes when he says
there was one 'who built a church to God, and then blasphemed His name:'
it was 'Deo erexit Voltaire' to whom that mad Calvinist and coddled poet
alludes. Thirdly, he misquotes and spoils a passage from
Shakspeare,--'To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,' etc.; for lily
he puts rose, and bedevils in more words than one the whole quotation.

"Now, Tom is a fine fellow; but he should be correct: for the first is
an injustice (to Anstey), the second an _ignorance_, and the third a
_blunder_. Tell him all this, and let him take it in good part: for I
might have chastised him in a review and punished him; instead of which,
I act like a Christian.

BYRON."

With regard to a quotation, or any circumstance intended to prove a
truth, his love of _exactness_ amounted to a _scruple_. He would have
thought himself wanting in honor if he had made a false or an incomplete
quotation. In one of the notes to "Don Juan," speaking of Voltaire, he
had quoted those famous words:--" _Zaire, vous pleurez_;" but being
accustomed at that time to make great use of the familiar pronoun
_thou_, as in the case in Italy, his quotation ran: "_Zaire, tu
pleures_." But he hastened to write to Murray, "_Voltaire wrote: Zaire,
vous pleurez_; don't forget."

In his tragedy of "Faliero," Lord Byron had said that the Doges,
Faliero's predecessors, were buried in the church of St. John and St.
Paul; but he afterward ascertained that it was only on the death of
Andrea Dandolo, Faliero's predecessor, that the Council of Ten, by a
sort of presentiment perhaps, decreed that the Doges should in future be
buried with their families in their own church; previously they had all
been interred in the church of St. Mark:--

" ... All that I said of his _ancestral Doges_, as buried at St. John's
and Paul's, is a mistak