CV.


TO DYER.

_February_ 22, 1831.

Dear Dyer,--Mr. Rogers and Mr. Rogers's friends are perfectly assured
that you never intended any harm by an innocent couplet, and that in the
revivification of it by blundering Barker you had no hand whatever. To
imagine that, at this time of day, Rogers broods over a fantastic
expression of more than thirty years' standing, would be to suppose him
indulging his "Pleasures of Memory" with a vengeance. You never penned a
line which for its own sake you need, dying, wish to blot. You mistake
your heart if you think you _can_ write a lampoon. Your whips are rods
of roses. [1] Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the
vicious,--abstract offences, not the concrete sinner. But you are
sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a
compliment as another man would at the perpetration of an affront. But
do not lug me into the same soreness of conscience with yourself. I
maintain, and will to the last hour, that I never writ of you but _con
amore_; that if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was
not for the purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with
scholar-like habits,--for is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat
near of sight before age naturally brings on the malady? You could not
then plead the _obrepens senectus_. Did I not, moreover, make it an
apology for a certain _absence_, which some of your friends may have
experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a
casual street-meeting; and did I not strengthen your excuse for this
slowness of recognition by further accounting morally for the present