His
personages don't interest us, and yours will. You will have no
competitor; and, if you had, you ought to be glad of it. The little I
have done in that way is merely a "voice in the wilderness" for you; and
if it has had any success, that also will prove that the public are
orientalising, and pave the path for you.
I have been thinking of a story, grafted on the amours of a Peri and a
mortal--something like, only more _philanthropical_ than, Cazotte's
_Diable Amoureux_ [6].
It would require a good deal of poesy, and tenderness is not my forte.
For that, and other reasons, I have given up the idea, and merely
suggest it to you, because, in intervals of your greater work, I think
it a subject you might make much of [7].
If you want any more books, there is "Castellan's _Moeurs des
Ottomans_," the best compendium of the kind I ever met with, in six
small tomes [8].
I am really taking a liberty by talking in this style to my "elders and
my betters;"--pardon it, and don't _Rochefoucault_ [9] my motives.
[Footnote 1: Jerry Sneak, in Foote's 'Mayor of Garratt' (act ii.), says
to Major Sturgeon, "I heard of your tricks at the King of Bohemy."]
[Footnote 2:
"The Ode of Horace--
'Natis in usum laetitiae,' etc.;
some passages of which I told him might be parodied, in allusion to
some of his late adventures:
'Quanta laboras in Charybdi!
Digne puer meliore flamma!'"
(Moore.)]
[Footnote 3:
"In his first edition of 'The Giaour' he had used this word as a
trisyllable--'Bright as the gem of Giamschid'--but on my remarking to
him, upon the authority of Richardson's Persian Dictionary, that this
was incorrect, he altered it to 'Bright as the ruby of Giamschid.
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