Chapter 68

"Ravenna, October 9. 1821.

"You will please to present or convey the enclosed poem to Mr. Moore. I sent him another copy to Paris, but he has probably left that city.

"Don't forget to send me my first act of 'Werner' (if Hobhouse can find it amongst my papers)--send it by the post (to Pisa); and also cut out Harriet Lee's 'German's Tale' from the 'Canterbury Tales,' and send it in a letter also. I began that tragedy in 1815.

"By the way, you have a good deal of my prose tracts in MS.? Let me have proofs of them _all_ again--I mean the controversial ones, including the last two or three years of time. Another question!--The Epistle of St. Paul, which I translated from the Armenian, for what reason have you kept it back, though you published that stuff which gave rise to the 'Vampire?' Is it because you are afraid to print any thing in opposition to the cant of the Quarterly about Manicheism? Let me have a proof of that Epistle directly. I am a better Christian than those parsons of yours, though not paid for being so.

"Send--Faber's Treatise on the Cabiri.

"Sainte Croix's Mystères du Paganisme (scarce, perhaps, but to be found, as Mitford refers to his work frequently).

"A common Bible, of a good legible print (bound in russia). I _have_ one; but as it was the last gift of my sister (whom I shall probably never see again), I can only use it carefully, and less frequently, because I like to keep it in good order. Don't forget this, for I am a great reader and admirer of those books, 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. I speak as a _boy_, from the recollected impression of that period at Aberdeen in 1796.

"Any novels of Scott, or poetry of the same. Ditto of Crabbe, Moore, and the Elect; but none of your curst common-place trash,--unless something starts up of actual merit, which may very well be, for 'tis time it should."

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