"]
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377.--To Professor Clarke [1].
Dec. 15, 1813.
Your very kind letter is the more agreeable, because, setting aside
talents, judgment, and the _laudari a laudato_, etc., you have been on
the spot; you have seen and described more of the East than any of your
predecessors--I need not say how ably and successfully; and (excuse the
bathos) you are one of the very few men who can pronounce how far my
costume (to use an affected but expressive word) is correct. As to
poesy, that is, as "men, gods, and columns," please to decide upon it;
but I am sure that I am anxious to have an observer's, particularly a
famous observer's, testimony on the fidelity of my manners and dresses;
and, as far as memory and an oriental twist in my imagination have
permitted, it has been my endeavour to present to the Franks, a sketch
of that of which you have and will present them a complete picture. It
was with this notion, that I felt compelled to make my hero and heroine
relatives, as you well know that none else could there obtain that
degree of intercourse leading to genuine affection; I had nearly made
them rather too much akin to each other; and though the wild passions of
the East, and some great examples in Alfieri, Ford, and Schiller (to
stop short of antiquity), might have pleaded in favour of a copyist, yet
the time and the north (not Frederic, but our climate) induced me to
alter their consanguinity and confine them to cousinship.
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