"He expressed some opinions," continues my informant, "on matters of taste, which cannot fail to interest his biographer. He contended that Sculpture, as an art, was vastly superior to Painting;--a preference which is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, in the fourth Canto of Childe Harold, he gives the most elaborate and splendid account of several statues, and none of any pictures; although Italy is, emphatically, the land of painting, and her best statues are derived from Greece. By the way, he told us that there were more objects of interest in Rome alone than in all Greece from one extremity to the other. After regaling us with an excellent dinner, (in which, by the by, a very English joint of roast beef showed that he did not extend his antipathies to all John-Bullisms,) he took me in his carriage some miles of our route towards Padua, after apologising to my fellow-traveller for the separation, on the score of his anxiety to hear all he could of his friends in England; and I quitted him with a confirmed impression of the strong ardour and sincerity of his attachment to those by whom he did not fancy himself slighted or ill treated." * * * * * LETTER 295. TO MR. MURRAY. "Sept. 4. 1817. "Your letter of the 15th has conveyed with its contents the impression of a seal, to which the 'Saracen's Head' is a seraph, and the 'Bull and Mouth' a delicate device. I knew that calumny had sufficiently _blackened_ me of later days, but not that it had given the features as well as complexion of a negro. Poor Augusta is not less, but rather more, shocked than myself, and says 'people seem to have lost their recollection strangely' when they engraved such a 'blackamoor.' Pray don't seal (at least to me) with such a caricature of the human numskull altogether; and if you don't break the seal-cutter's head, at least crack his libel (or likeness, if it should be a likeness) of mine. "Mr. Kinnaird is not yet arrived, but expected. He has lost by the way all the tooth-powder, as a letter from Spa informs me. "By Mr. Rose I received safely, though tardily, magnesia and tooth-powder, and * * * *. Why do you send me such trash--worse than trash, the Sublime of Mediocrity? Thanks for Lalla, however, which is good; and thanks for the Edinburgh and Quarterly, both very amusing and well-written. Paris in 1815, &c.--good. Modern Greece--good for nothing; written by some one who has never been there, and not being able to manage the Spenser stanza, has invented a thing of his own, consisting of two elegiac stanzas, an heroic line, and an Alexandrine, twisted on a string. Besides, why '_modern_?' You may say _modern Greeks_, but surely _Greece_ itself is rather more ancient than ever it was. Now for business.