be for _his benefit_, and it is to and for him that you will name a
price, if you take upon you the work. _I_ would _edite_ it myself,
but am too far off, and too lazy to undertake it; but I wish that
it could be done. The letters of Lord Hervey, in Mr. Rose's[19]
opinion and mine, are good; and the _short_ French love letters
_certainly_ are Lady M.W. Montague's--the _French_ not good, but
the sentiments beautiful. Gray's letter good; and Mason's
tolerable. The whole correspondence must be _well weeded_; but this
being done, a small and pretty popular volume might be made of
it.--There are many ministers' letters--Gray, the ambassador at
Naples, Horace Mann, and others of the same kind of animal.

"I thought of a preface, defending Lord Hervey against Pope's
attack, but Pope--_quoad_ Pope, the poet--against all the world, in
the unjustifiable attempts begun by Warton and carried on at this
day by the new school of critics and scribblers, who think
themselves poets because they do _not_ write like Pope. I have no
patience with such cursed humbug and bad taste; your whole
generation are not worth a Canto of the Rape of the Lock, or the
Essay on Man, or the Dunciad, or 'any thing that is his.'--But it
is three in the matin, and I must go to bed. Yours alway," &c.

[Footnote 19: Among Lord Byron's papers, I find some verses addressed to
him, about this time, by Mr. W. Rose, with the following note annexed to
them:--"These verses were sent to me by W.S. Rose, from Abaro, in the
spring of 1818. They are good and true; and Rose is a fine fellow, and
one of the few English who understand _Italy_, without which Italian is
nothing." The verses begin thus:

"Byron[20], while you make gay what circle fits ye,