were most anxious and particular.

"He expressed some opinions," continues my informant, "on matters of
taste, which cannot fail to interest his biographer. He contended that
Sculpture, as an art, was vastly superior to Painting;--a preference
which is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, in the fourth Canto of
Childe Harold, he gives the most elaborate and splendid account of
several statues, and none of any pictures; although Italy is,
emphatically, the land of painting, and her best statues are derived
from Greece. By the way, he told us that there were more objects of
interest in Rome alone than in all Greece from one extremity to the
other. After regaling us with an excellent dinner, (in which, by the by,
a very English joint of roast beef showed that he did not extend his
antipathies to all John-Bullisms,) he took me in his carriage some miles
of our route towards Padua, after apologising to my fellow-traveller for
the separation, on the score of his anxiety to hear all he could of his
friends in England; and I quitted him with a confirmed impression of the
strong ardour and sincerity of his attachment to those by whom he did
not fancy himself slighted or ill treated."

* * * * *

LETTER 295. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Sept. 4. 1817.

"Your letter of the 15th has conveyed with its contents the
impression of a seal, to which the 'Saracen's Head' is a seraph,
and the 'Bull and Mouth' a delicate device. I knew that calumny had
sufficiently _blackened_ me of later days, but not that it had