There are some things in the critique which are necessarily and
unavoidably personal, and sure I am if he attends to it, which is
unlikely, he will find advantage from doing so. I wish Mr. Gifford and
you would consider every word carefully. If you think the general tenor
is likely to make any impression on him, if you think it likely to hurt
him either in his feelings or with the public, in God's name fling the
sheets in the fire and let them be as _not written_. But if it appears,
I should wish him to get an early copy, and that you would at the same
time say I am the author, at your opportunity. No one can honour Lord
Byron a genius more than I do, and no one had so great a wish to love
him personally, though personally we had not the means of becoming very
intimate. In his family distress (deeply to be deprecated, and in which
probably he can yet be excused) I still looked to some moment of
reflection when bad advisers (and, except you were one, I have heard of
few whom I should call good) were distant from the side of one who is so
much the child of feeling and emotion. An opportunity was once afforded
me of interfering, but things appeared to me to have gone too far; yet,
even after all, I wish I had tried it, for Lord Byron always seemed to
give me credit for wishing him sincerely well, and knew me to be
superior to what Commodore Trunnion would call "the trash of literary
envy and petty rivalry.
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