course.

"When you can spare time from _duetting, coquetting_, and
claretting with your Hibernians of both sexes, let me have a line
from you. I doubt whether Paris is a good place for the composition
of your new poesy."

[Footnote 82: "Received from Mr. Henry Dunn the sum of two hundred
Tuscan crowns (for account of the Right Honourable Lord Noel Byron), for
the purpose of assisting the Irish poor.

"Thomas Hall.

"Leghorn, 9th July, 1822. Tuscan crowns, 200."]

* * * * *

LETTER 502. TO MR. MOORE.

"Pisa, August 8. 1822.

"You will have heard by this time that Shelley and another
gentleman (Captain Williams) were drowned about a month ago (a
_month_ yesterday), in a squall off the Gulf of Spezia. There is
thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and
ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice
_now_, when he can be no better for it.[83]

"I have not seen the thing you mention[84], and only heard of it
casually, nor have I any desire. The price is, as I saw in some
advertisements, fourteen shillings, which is too much to pay for a
libel on oneself. Some one said in a letter, that it was a Doctor
Watkins, who deals in the life and libel line. It must have
diminished your natural pleasure, as a friend (vide
Rochefoucault), to see yourself in it.

"With regard to the Blackwood fellows, I never published any thing
against them; nor, indeed, have seen their magazine (except in
Galignani's extracts) for these three years past. I once wrote, a
good while ago, some remarks [85] on their review of Don Juan, but
saying very little about themselves, and these were _not_
published. If you think that I ought to follow your example[86](and
I like to be in your company when I can) in contradicting their
impudence, you may shape this declaration of mine into a similar
paragraph for me. It is possible that you may have seen the little
I _did_ write (and never published) at Murray's;--it contained much
more about Southey than about the Blacks.

"If you think that I ought to do any thing about Watkins's book, I
should not care much about publishing _my Memoir now_, should it be
necessary to counteract the fellow. But, in _that_ case, I should
like to look over the _press_ myself. Let me