This letter was dated on Saturday, the 11th of December, 1813.  On Sunday, the 12th, he made the following other note in his memorandum book:

“By Galt’s answer, I find it is some story in real life, and not any work with which my late composition coincides.  It is still more singular, for mine is drawn from existence also.”

The most amusing part of this little fracas is the denial of his Lordship, as to pilfering the thoughts and fancies of others; for it so happens, that the first passage of The Bride of Abydos, the poem in question, is almost a literal and unacknowledged translation from Goethe, which was pointed out in some of the periodicals soon after the work was published.

Then, as to his not thieving from me or mine, I believe the fact to be as he has stated; but there are singular circumstances connected with some of his other productions, of which the account is at least curious.

On leaving England I began to write a poem in the Spenserian measure.  It was called The Unknown, and was intended to describe, in narrating the voyages and adventures of a pilgrim, who had embarked for the Holy Land, the scenes I expected to visit.  I was occasionally engaged in this composition during the passage with Lord Byron from Gibraltar to Malta, and he knew what I was about.  In stating this, I beg to be distinctly understood, as in no way whatever intending to insinuate that this work had any influence on the composition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which Lord Byron began to write in Albania; but it must be considered as something extraordinary, that the two works should have been so similar in plan, and in the structure of the verse.  His Lordship never saw my attempt that I know of, nor did I his poem until it was printed.  It is needless to add, that beyond the plan and verse there was no other similarity between the two works; I wish there had been.

His Lordship has published a poem, called The Curse of Minerva, the subject of which is the vengeance of the goddess on Lord Elgin for the rape of the Parthenon.  It has so happened that I wrote at Athens a burlesque poem on nearly the same subject (mine relates to the vengeance of all the gods) which I called The Atheniad; the manuscript was sent to his Lordship in Asia Minor, and returned to me through Mr Hobhouse.  His Curse of Minerva, I saw for the first time in 1828, in Galignani’s edition of his works.

In The Giaour, which he published a short time before The Bride of Abydos, he has this passage, descriptive of the anxiety with which the mother of Hassan looks out for the arrival of her son: