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But I had now, in addition to these home calls upon the Muse, a new, painful, and, in its first aspect, overwhelming exigence to provide for; and, certainly, Paris, swarming throughout as it was, at that period, with rich, gay, and dissipated English, was, to a person of my social habits and multifarious acquaintance, the very worst possible place that could have been resorted to for even the semblance of a quiet or studious home. The only tranquil, and, therefore to me, most precious portions of that period were the two summers passed by my family and myself with our kind Spanish friends, the V** **** ls, at their beautiful place, La Butte Coaslin, on the road up to Bellevue. There, in a cottage belonging to M. V******* 1, and but a few steps from his house, we contrived to conjure up an apparition of Sloperton;* and I was able for some time to work with a feeling of comfort and home. I used frequently to pass the morning in rambling alone through the noble park of St. Cloud, with no apparatus for the work of authorship but my memorandum-book and pencils, forming sentences to run smooth and moulding verses into shape. In the evenings I generally joined with Madame V*******】 in Italian duetts, or, with far more pleasure, sate as listener, while she sung to the Spanish guitar those sweet songs of her own country to which few voices could do such justice.

"A little cot, with trees arow,

And, like its master, very low."

POPE.

One of the pleasant circumstances connected with our summer visits to La Butte was the near neighbourhood of our friend, Mr. Kenny, the lively dramatic writer, who was lodged picturesquely in the remains of the Palace of the King's Aunts, at Bellevue. I remember, on my first telling Kenny the particulars of my Bermuda mishap, his saying, after a pause of real feeling, "Well, it's lucky you're a poet; a philosopher never could have borne it." Washington Irving also was, for a short time, our visitor; and still recollects, I trust, his reading to me some parts of his then forthcoming work, Bracebridge Hall, as we sate together on the grass walk that leads to the Rocher, at La Butte.

Among the writings, then but in embryo, to which I looked forward for the means of my enfranchisement, one of the most important, as well as most likely to be productive, was my intended Life of Sheridan. But I soon found that, at such a distance from all those living authorities from whom alone I could gain any interesting information respecting the private life of one who left behind him so little epistolary correspondence, it would be wholly impossible to proceed satisfactorily with this task. Accordingly I wrote to Mr. Murray and Mr. Wilkie, who were at that time the intended publishers of the work, to apprise them of this temporary obstacle its progress.

Being thus baffled in the very first of the few resources I had looked to, I next thought of a Ro

mance in verse, in the form of Letters, or Epistles; and with this view sketched out a story, on an Egyptian subject, differing not much from that which, some years after, formed the groundwork of the Epicurean. After labouring, however, for some months, at this experiment, amidst interruption, dissipation, and distraction, which might well put all the Nine Muses to flight, I gave up the attempt in despair ;· fully convinced of the truth of that warning conveyed in some early verses of my own, addressed to the Invisible Girl:

Oh hint to the bard, 't is retirement alone
Can hallow his harp or ennoble its tone:
Like you, with a veil of seclusion between,
His song to the world let him utter unseen,

etc. etc.*

It was, indeed, to the secluded life I led during the years 1813-1816, in a lone cottage among the fields, in Derbyshire, that I owed the inspiration, whatever may have been its value, of some of the best and most popular portions of Lalla Rookh. It was amidst the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters that I found myself enabled, by that concentration of thought which retirement alone gives, to call up around me some of the sunniest of those Eastern scenes which have since been welcomed in India itself, as almost native to its clime.

efforts

Abortive, however, as had now been all my to woo the shy spirit of Poesy, amidst such unquiet

Vol. i. p. 235.

scenes, the course of reading I found time to pursue, on the subject of Egypt, was of no small service in storing my mind with the various knowledge respecting that country, which some years later I turned to account, in writing the story of the Epicurean. The kind facilities, indeed, towards this object, which some of the most distinguished French scholars and artists afforded me, are still remembered by me with thankfulness. Besides my old acquaintance, Denon, whose drawings of Egypt, then of some value, I frequently consulted, I found Mons. Fourier and Mons. Langlès no less prompt in placing books at my disposal. With Humboldt, also, who was at that time in Paris, I had more than once some conversation on the subject of Egypt, and remember his expressing himself in no very laudatory terms respecting the labours of the French savans in that country.

I had now been foiled and frustrated in two of those literary projects on which I had counted most sanguinely in the calculation of my resources; and, though I had found sufficient time to furnish my musical publisher with the Eighth Number of the Irish Melodies, and also a Number of the National Airs, these works alone, I knew, would yield but an insufficient supply, compared with the demands so closely and threateningly hanging over me. In this difficulty I called to mind a subject, the Eastern allegory of the Loves of the Angels, on which I bad, some years before, begun a prose story but in

which, as a theme for poetry, I had now been anticipated by Lord Byron, in one of the most sublime of his many poetical miracles, "Heaven and Earth." Knowing how soon I should be lost in the shadow into which so gigantic a precursor would cast me, I had endeavoured, by a speed of composition which must have astonished my habitually slow pen, to get the start of my noble friend in the time of publication, and thus give myself the sole chance I could perhaps expect, under such unequal rivalry, of attracting to my work the attention of the public. In this humble speculation, however, I failed; for both works, if I recollect right, made their appearance at the same time.

In the meanwhile, the negotiation which had been entered into with the American claimants, for a reduction of the amount of their demands upon me, had continued to "drag its slow length along;" nor was it till the month of September, 1822, that, by a letter from the Messrs. Longman, I received the welcome intelligence that the terms offered, as our ultimatum, to the opposite party, had been at last accepted, and that I might now with safety return to England. I lost no time, of course, in availing myself of so welcome a privilege; and as all that remains now to be told of this trying episode in my past life may be comprised in a small compass, I shall trust to the patience of my readers for tolerating the recital.

On arriving in England I learned, for the first

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