"I hope you will be out soon. _March_, sir, _March_ is the month
for the _trade_, and they must be considered. You have written a
very noble Poem, and nothing but the detestable taste of the day
can do you harm,--but I think you will beat it. Your measure is
uncommonly well chosen and wielded."[116]

[Footnote 115: When these monthly disbursements had amounted to 70_l._,
Ashe wrote to beg that the whole remaining sum of 80_l_. might be
advanced to him at one payment, in order to enable him, as he said, to
avail himself of a passage to New South Wales, which had been again
offered to him. The sum was accordingly, by Lord Byron's orders, paid
into his hands.]

[Footnote 116: This letter is but a fragment,--the remainder being
lost.]

* * * * *

In the extracts from his Journal, just given, there is a passage that
cannot fail to have been remarked, where, in speaking of his admiration
of some lady, whose name he has himself left blank, the noble writer
says--"a wife would be the salvation of me." It was under this
conviction, which not only himself but some of his friends entertained,
of the prudence of his taking timely refuge in matrimony from those
perplexities which form the sequel of all less regular ties, that he had
been induced, about a year before, to turn his thoughts seriously to
marriage,--at least, as seriously as his thoughts were ever capable of
being so turned,--and chiefly, I believe, by the advice and intervention
of his friend Lady Melbourne, to become a suitor for the hand of a