speed the little republic! I should like to see the Hague and the
village of Brock, where they have such primitive habits. Yet, I don't
know,--their canals would cut a poor figure by the memory of the
Bosphorus; and the Zuyder Zee look awkwardly after 'Ak-Denizi.' No
matter,--the bluff burghers, puffing freedom out of their short
tobacco-pipes, might be worth seeing; though I prefer a cigar or a
hooka, with the rose-leaf mixed with the milder herb of the Levant. I
don't know what liberty means,--never having seen it,--but wealth is
power all over the world; and as a shilling performs the duty of a pound
(besides sun and sky and beauty for nothing) in the East,--_that_ is the
country. How I envy Herodes Atticus!--more than Pomponius. And yet a
little _tumult_, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation;
such as a revolution, a battle, or an _aventure_ of any lively
description. I think I rather would have been Bonneval, Ripperda,
Alberoni, Hayreddin, or Horuc Barbarossa, or even Wortley Montague, than
Mahomet himself.

"Rogers will be in town soon?--the 23d is fixed for our Middleton visit.
Shall I go? umph!--In this island, where one can't ride out without
overtaking the sea, it don't much matter where one goes.

"I remember the effect of the _first_ Edinburgh Review on me. I heard of
it six weeks before,--read it the day of its denunciation,--dined and
drank three bottles of claret, (with S.B. Davies, I think,) neither ate
nor slept the less, but, nevertheless, was not easy till I had vented my
wrath and my rhyme, in the same pages, against every thing and every
body. Like George, in the Vicar of Wakefield, 'the fate of my paradoxes'
would allow me to perceive no merit in another. I remembered only the
maxim of my boxing-master, which, in my youth, was found useful in all
general riots,--'Whoever is not for you is against you--_mill_ away