alleged change in Mr. Shelley, Lord Byron, for one, certainly had no conception of any such thing at least,'if he has said so in his letters, (the assertions in which our credulous reviewer takes all for "matter of fact,") it was totally in opposition to the character, with which (in the teeth of his excessive eulogies of the deceased) he threatened to brand his memory, the moment he thought he had found reason to quarrel with it.

But I am again led away to say more than is necessary at present. I wait for Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore ought to have been ashamed of himself, when he acted in that underhand manner against his old acquaintance and his own cause. He knew what a situation I was in; what a family I had; what struggles I had gone through, for the sake of freedom; and how openly I had ever behaved to himself, both in what I ventured to praise in him and to differ with; and yet all this did not hinder him

from practising against the Liberal, in a way the most disingenuous towards me, and upon grounds the most ridiculous in him. I have since expressed my resentment in a strong but not ungenerous manner; and he has the credit, upon the very ground on which he ought to have spared me originally, and which collects in one burning spot of thought all that is painful in my past life, and bitter at present, of aiming a blow at me as the father of a family (which I am), and a fellow turn-spit (which I never was). I could have answered his metaphors with interest, had the bandying of abuse been to my taste, and many extreme cares not been upon me; but the same circumstances in my position, which, connected with all that I have done and hazarded in this world, show how impossible it was for me to speak of the dead in any rascally spirit of calculation, will not allow me to spare any truth whatsoever, (the other sex not suffering

by it,) which will hinder me from being crushed; and should his book render it necessary, I will most assuredly spare neither him, nor his publisher, nor any one person or thing, short of the exception just noticed, which will serve to fill up all that has been omitted, and to show of what sort of stuff a Lord and his advisers can be made.

Talk of speaking ill of a dead Lord, and an imaginary patron! How have I not been talked of and misrepresented in these matters between Lord Byron and myself, while I did not say a word on the subject? What patron, or dead person, lord or commoner, or king, or what excess of human infirmity, did Lord Byron spare, when the mood was upon him? How many persons has Mr. Moore himself not attacked in his day? Many that never offended him, and some whose calamities gave them a right to be spared. How might not Lord Byron (as the world shall see) have trampled

on the memory of my friend Mr. Shelley, if I had not told him I should be compelled to make him repent it?-Mr. Shelley, who had been really his benefactor, if people knew all. And what sort of living people did this lion of the perfumed locks (in whose favour I have been gifted with so many new and ingenious appellations) select and pitch upon, on whom to show his lion-like nature? On the man that would have taken the thorn out of his foot ?-or on the woman who had lain in his bosom ? These are not the sort of defences to be found for him; nor can any question be begged in his favour which does not carry the whole of humanity along with it. Such I have never denied him; and such shall not be denied me.

If any man, after reading the whole of my book, be capable of thinking that I have uttered a single thing which I do not believe to be true, or that in what I have uttered I was

prompted by any impulses incapable of a generous construction, he is speaking out of his own instinctive meanness, and his own conscious want of veracity; and I return him any epithets he may be inclined to bestow upon me, as equally unfit for me to receive, and himself to part with.

If any one can convince me of an error,I am not in love with error, but truth-and will gladly rectify it. I boast of being a Liberal in the sense laid down the other day by the Morning Chronicle, and am ready on all occasions to be tried by it.*

Finally, if any one asks what it is that supports me under the trying circumstances,

"The terms liberal and illiberal," says the Chronicle, "would, in the present day, be more appropriate than those of Whig and Tory. Liberal supposes an homage to knowledge, a disposition to submit all opinions to the test of free enquiry, and to be always open to conviction. Whig and Tory, as opposed to each other, as we have observed, is a merely nominal distinction; but liberal and illiberal are as opposite as light and darkness."