Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/222

 discussion, what does that prove but the general merit of the whole piece? And the correspondence will be valuable by and bye, and save the commentators a vast deal of labour, and waste of ingenuity. People do wisest who take care of their fame when they have got it. That’s the rock I have split on. It has been said that he has been puffed into notice by his dinners and Lady Holland. Though he gives very good ones, and female Mæcenases are no bad things now-a-days, it is by no means true. Rogers has been a spoilt child; no wonder that he is a little vain and jealous. And yet he deals praise very liberally sometimes; for he wrote to a little friend of mine, on the occasion of his late publication, that ‘he was born with a rose-bud in his mouth, and a nightingale singing in his ear,’—two very prettily turned Orientalisms. Before my wife and the world quarrelled with me, and brought me into disrepute with the public, Rogers had composed some very pretty commendatory verses on me; but they were kept corked up for many long years, under hope that I might reform and get into favour with the world again, and that the said lines (for he is rather costive, and does not like to throw away his effusions) might find a place in ‘Human Life.’ But after a great deal of oscillation, and