Rivers is to be commended for not throwing a single Stone at Mrs. Thrale's second marriage. This poor lady begins to receive a little justice. The literary world seems to have found out that a blue-stocking dame who keeps open house for a set among them has a right, if it so please her, to marry again without taking measures to carry on the cake-shop. I was before my age in this respect: as a boy-reader of Boswell, and a few other things that fell in my way, I came to a clearness that the conduct of society towards Mrs. Piozzi was _blackguard_. She wanted nothing but what was in that day a woman's only efficient protection, a male relation with a brace of pistols, and a competent notion of using them. BYRON AND WORDSWORTH. Byron's mistake about Hallam in the Pindar story may be worth placing among absurdities. For elucidation, suppose that some poet were now to speak-- {274} "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Eve gave to Adam in his birthday suit--" and some critic were to call it nonsense, would that critic be laughing at Milton? Payne Knight,[436] in his _Taste_, translated part of Gray's _Bard_ into Greek. Some of his lines are [Greek: therma d' ho tengon dakrua stonachais] [Greek: oulon melos phoberai] [Greek: eeide phonai.] Literally thus: "Wetting warm tears with groans, Continuous chant with fearful Voice he sang." On which Hallam remarks: "The twelfth line [our first] is nonsense." And so it is, a poet can no more wet his tears with his groans than wet his ale with his whistle. Now this first line is from Pindar, but is only part of the sense; in full it is: [Greek: therma de tengon dakrua stonachais] [Greek: horthion phonase.] Pindar's [Greek: tengon] must be Englished by _shedding_, and he stands alone in this use. He says, "shedding warm tears, he cried out loud, with groans." Byron speaks of "Classic Hallam, much renowned for Greek:" and represents him as criticising _the Greek_ of all Payne's lines, and not discovering that "the lines" were Pindar's {275} until after publication. Byron was too much of a scholar to make this blunder himself: he either accepted the facts from report, or else took satirical licence. And why not? If you want to laugh at a person, and he will not give occasion, whose fault is it that you are obliged to make it? Hallam did criticise some of Payne Knight's Greek; but with the caution of his character, he remarked that possibly some of these queer phrases might be "critic-traps" justified by some one use of some one author. I remember well having a Latin essay to write at Cambridge, in which I took care to insert a few monstrous and unusual idioms from Cicero: a person with a Nizolius,[437] and without scruples may get scores of them. So when my tutor raised his voice against these oddities, I was up to him, for I came down upon him with Cicero, chapter and verse, and got round him. And so my own solecisms, many of them, passed unchallenged.