In July, 1824, she was out riding, when she accidentally met Byron's funeral on its way to Newstead. "I am sure," she wrote to Murray, July 13, 1824, "I am very sorry I ever said one unkind word against him." Her mind never recovered the shock, and she died in January, 1828, in the presence of her husband, at Melbourne House. (See also Appendix III., 6.)]
DEAR SIR,--Pray have the goodness to send those despatches, and a No. of the _E.R._ with the rest. I hope you have written to Mr. Thompson, thanked him in my name for his present, and told him that I shall be truly happy to comply with his request.--How do you go on? and when is the graven image, "with _bays and wicked rhyme upon't_," to grace, or disgrace, some of our tardy editions?
Send me "_Rokeby_" [1] who the deuce is he?--no matter, he has good connections, and will be well introduced. I thank you for your inquiries: I am so so, but my thermometer is sadly below the poetical point. What will you give _me_ or _mine_ for a poem [2] of six cantos, (_when complete--no_ rhyme, _no_ recompense,) as like the last two as I can make them? I have some ideas which one day may be embodied, and till winter I shall have much leisure.
P. S.--My last question is in the true style of Grub Street; but, like _Jeremy Diddler_ [3], I only "ask for information."--Send me Adair on _Diet and Regimen_, just republished by Ridgway [4].
[Footnote 1: 'Rokeby', completed December 31, 1812, was published in the following year, with a dedication to John Morritt, to whom Rokeby belonged. It was, as Scott admits in the Preface to the edition of 1830, comparatively a failure. In the popularity of Byron he finds the chief cause of the small success which his poem obtained.
"To have kept his ground at the crisis when 'Rokeby' appeared," he writes, "its author ought to have put forth his utmost strength, and to have possessed all his original advantages, for a mighty and unexpected rival was advancing on the stage--a rival not in poetical powers only, but in that art of attracting popularity, in which the present writer had hitherto preceded better men than himself. The reader will easily see that Byron is here meant, who, after a little velitation of no great promise, now appeared as a serious candidate, in the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold'."