BYRON, 'March 14th, 1811.' Athens, Capuchin Convent. ['MS. L. (b)'.]] [Footnote 1: Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) succeeded West as P.R.A. in 1820. Benjamin West (1738-1820) had been elected P.R.A. in 1792, on the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds.] [Footnote 2: In an English newspaper, which finds its way abroad wherever there are Englishmen, I read an account of this dirty dauber's caricature of Mr. H---as a "beast," and the consequent action, etc. The circumstance is, probably, too well known to require further comment. [Thomas Hope (1770-1831) was celebrated for his collections of pictures, sculpture, and _bric-à-brac_. He was the author of _Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek, etc_., which was attributed to Byron, and, according to Lady Blessington, excited his envy. "Low Dubost" was a French painter, who, in revenge for some fancied injustice, caricatured Hope and his wife as Beauty and the Beast. An exhibition of the sketch is said to have brought in from twenty to thirty pounds a week. A brother of Mrs. Hope (Louisa Beresford, daughter of Lord Decies, Archbishop of Tuam) mutilated the picture, and, an action having been brought, was ordered to pay a nominal sum of five pounds. Dubost's academy portrait of Mrs. Hope did not please Peter Pindar. "In Mistress Hope, Monsieur Dubost! Thy Genius yieldeth up the Ghost." _Works_ (1812), v. 372.]] [Footnote 3: "While pure Description held the place of Sense."-- Pope, _Prol. to the Sat.,_ L. 148. "While Mr. Sol decked out all so glorious Shines like a Beau in his Birthday Embroidery." [Fielding, _Tom Thumb_, act i. sc. I.]--[_MS. M._] "_Fas est et ab Hoste doceri._" In the 7th Art. of the 31st No. of the _Edinburgh Review_ (vol. xvi. Ap. 1810) the "Observations" of an Oxford Tutor are compared to "Children's Cradles" (page 181), then to a "Barndoor fowl flying" (page 182), then the man himself to "a Coach-horse on the Trottoir" (page 185) etc., etc., with a variety of other conundrums all tending to prove that the ingenuity of comparison increases in proportion to the dissimilarity between the things compared.--[_MS. L. (b) erased._]] [Footnote 4: Mere common mortals were commonly content with one Taylor and with one bill, but the more particular gentlemen found it impossible to confide their lower garments to the makers of their body clothes. I speak of the beginning of 1809: what reform may have since taken place I neither know, nor desire to know.--[_MSS. L. (b), M_.]] [Footnote 5: Mr. Pitt was liberal in his additions to our Parliamentary tongue; as may be seen in many publications, particularly the 'Edinburgh Review'.