Ceasing to _live_ is a much more serious concern, and ought not to be first; therefore I will let the old couplet stand, with its half rhymes 'sought' and 'wrote.'[51] Second thoughts in every thing are best, but, in rhyme, third and fourth don't come amiss. I am very anxious on this business, and I do hope that the very trouble I occasion you will plead its own excuse, and that it will tend to show my endeavour to make the most of the time allotted. I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another. I always scrawl in this way, and smooth as much as I can, but never sufficiently; and, latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning. When I began 'Childe Harold,' I had never tried Spenser's measure, and now I cannot scribble in any other. "After all, my dear Lord, if you can get a decent Address elsewhere, don't hesitate to put this aside. Why did you not trust your own Muse? I am very sure she would have been triumphant, and saved the Committee their trouble--''tis a joyful one' to me, but I fear I shall not satisfy even myself. After the account you sent me, 'tis no compliment to say you would have beaten your candidates; but I mean that, in _that_ case, there would have been no occasion for their being beaten at all. "There are but two decent prologues in our tongue--Pope's to Cato--Johnson's to Drury Lane. These, with the epilogue to the 'Distrest Mother,' and, I think, one of Goldsmith's, and a prologue of old Colman's to Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, are the best things of the kind we have. "P.S.--I am diluted to the throat with medicine for the stone; and Boisragon wants me to try a warm climate for the winter--but I won't." [Footnote 51: "Such are the names that here your plaudits sought, When Garrick acted, and when Brinsley wrote." At present the couplet stands thus:-- "Dear are the days that made our annals bright, Ere Garrick fled, or Brinsley ceased to write." ] * * * * * LETTER 100. TO LORD HOLLAND. "September 27. 1812. "I have just received your very kind letter, and hope you have met with a second copy corrected and addressed to Holland House, with some omissions and this new couplet, "As glared each rising flash[52], and ghastly shone The skies with lightnings awful as their own.