"I am really and truly ashamed of myself for having let so many acts of kindness on your part remain unnoticed and unacknowledged on mine. But the world seems determined to make me a man of letters in more senses than one, and almost every day brings me such an influx of epistles from mere strangers that friends hardly ever get a line from me. My friend Washington Irving used to say, 'It is much easier to get a book from Moore than a letter.' But this has not been the case, I am sorry to say, of late; for the penny-post has become the sole channel of my inspirations. How _am_ I to thank you sufficiently for all your and Mrs. Hall's kindness to me? She must come down here, when the summer arrives, and be thanked _a quattr' occhi_,--far better way of thanking than at such a cold distance. Your letter to the mad Repealers was far too good and wise and gentle to have much effect on such rantipoles."[K] The house in Aungier Street I visited so recently as 1864. It was then, and still is, as it was in 1779, the dwelling of a grocer,--altered only so far as that a bust of the poet is placed over the door, and the fact that he was born there is recorded at the side. May no modern "improvement" ever touch it! "The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground." This humble dwelling of the humble tradesman is the house of which the poet speaks in so many of his early letters and memoranda. Here, when a child in years, he arranged a debating society, consisting of himself and his father's two "clerks." Here he picked up a little Italian from a kindly old priest who had passed some time in Italy, and obtained a "smattering of French" from an intelligent _emigre_, named La Frosse. Here his tender mother watched over his boyhood, proud of his opening promise, and hopeful, yet apprehensive, of his future. Here he and his sister, "excellent Nell," acquired music, first upon an old harpsichord, obtained by his father in discharge of a debt, and afterwards on a piano, to buy which his loving mother had saved up all superfluous pence. Hence he issued to lake country walks with unhappy Robert Emmet. Hither he came--not less proudly, yet as fondly as ever--when college magnates had given him honor, and the King's Viceroy had received him as a guest.