[Footnote 76: The passage referred to by the Reviewers is in the poem entitled "Resentment;" and the following is, I take for granted, the part which Lord Byron is accused by them of having imitated:--
"Those are like wax--apply them to the fire, Melting, they take th' impressions you desire; Easy to mould, and fashion as you please, And again moulded with an equal ease: Like smelted iron these the forms retain; But, once impress'd, will never melt again." ]
"As our late--I might say, deceased--correspondence had too much of the town-life leaven in it, we will now, 'paulo majora,' prattle a little of literature in all its branches; and first of the first--criticism. The Prince is at Brighton, and Jackson, the boxer, gone to Margate, having, I believe, decoyed Yarmouth to see a milling in that polite neighbourhood. Made. de Staël Holstein has lost one of her young barons, who has been carbonadoed by a vile Teutonic adjutant,--kilt and killed in a coffee-house at Scrawsenhawsen. Corinne is, of course, what all mothers must be,--but will, I venture to prophesy, do what few mothers could--write an Essay upon it. She cannot exist without a grievance--and somebody to see, or read, how much grief becomes her. I have not seen her since the event; but merely judge (not very charitably) from prior observation.
"In a 'mail-coach copy' of the Edinburgh, I perceive The Giaour is second article. The numbers are still in the Leith smack--_pray, which way is the wind?_ The said article is so very mild and sentimental, that it must be written by Jeffrey _in love_;--you know he is gone to America to marry some fair one, of whom he has been, for several _quarters, éperdument amoureux_. Seriously--as Winifred Jenkins says of Lismahago--Mr. Jeffrey (or his deputy) 'has done the handsome thing by me,' and I say _nothing_. But this I will say, if you and I had knocked one another on the head in this quarrel, how he would have laughed, and what a mighty bad figure we should have cut in our posthumous works. By the by, I was called _in_ the other day to mediate between two gentlemen bent upon carnage, and,--after a long struggle between the natural desire of destroying one's fellow-creatures, and the dislike of seeing men play the fool for nothing,--I got one to make an apology, and the other to take it, and left them to live happy ever after. One was a peer, the other a friend untitled, and both fond of high play;--and one, I can swear for, though very mild, 'not fearful,' and so dead a shot, that, though the other is the thinnest of men, he would have split him like a cane. They both conducted themselves very well, and I put them out of _pain_ as soon as I could.