Chapter LXIX: Letter 462: To Mr. Murray

"Ravenna, October 9. 1821.

"You will please to present or convey the enclosed poem to Mr.
Moore. I sent him another copy to Paris, but he has probably left
that city.

"Don't forget to send me my first act of 'Werner' (if Hobhouse can
find it amongst my papers)--send it by the post (to Pisa); and also
cut out Harriet Lee's 'German's Tale' from the 'Canterbury Tales,'
and send it in a letter also. I began that tragedy in 1815.

"By the way, you have a good deal of my prose tracts in MS.? Let me
have proofs of them _all_ again--I mean the controversial ones,
including the last two or three years of time. Another
question!--The Epistle of St. Paul, which I translated from the
Armenian, for what reason have you kept it back, though you
published that stuff which gave rise to the 'Vampire?' Is it
because you are afraid to print any thing in opposition to the cant
of the Quarterly about Manicheism? Let me have a proof of that
Epistle directly. I am a better Christian than those parsons of
yours, though not paid for being so.

"Send--Faber's Treatise on the Cabiri.

"Sainte Croix's Mystères du Paganisme (scarce, perhaps, but to be
found, as Mitford refers to his work frequently).

"A common Bible, of a good legible print (bound in russia). I
_have_ one; but as it was the last gift of my sister (whom I shall
probably never see again), I can only use it carefully, and less
frequently, because I like to keep it in good order. Don't forget
this, for I am a great reader and admirer of those books, and had
read them through and through before I was eight years old,--that
is to say, the _Old_ Testament, for the New struck me as a task,
but the other as a pleasure. I speak as a _boy_, from the
recollected impression of that period at Aberdeen in 1796.

"Any novels of Scott, or poetry of the same. Ditto of Crabbe,
Moore, and the Elect; but none of your curst common-place
trash,--unless something starts up of actual merit, which may very
well be, for 'tis time it should."

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