'visiter of yours. In November last he wrote to me a well-meaning letter, stating, for some reasons of his ' own, his belief that a reunion might be effected 'between Lady B. and myself. To this I answered ' as usual; and he sent me a second letter, repeating 'his notions, which letter I have never answered, ' having had a thousand other things to think of. He now writes as if he believed that he had offended 'me by touching on the topic; and I wish you to 'assure him that I am not at all so,-but, on the contrary, obliged by his good-nature. At the same time acquaint him the thing is impossible. 'know this, as well as I,-and there let it end.

You

'I believe that I showed you his epistle in autumn 'last. He asks me if I have heard of my "laureat" at Paris*,-somebody who has written "a most sanguinary Epître" against me; but whether in French, or Dutch, or on what score, I know not, and he don't say, except that (for my satisfaction) he says it is 'the best thing in the fellow's volume. If there is any thing of the kind that I ought to know, you will 'doubtless tell me. I suppose it to be something of 'the usual sort;-he says, he don't remember the ' author's name.

'I wrote to you some ten days ago, and expect an answer at your leisure.

The separation business still continues, and all the 'world are implicated, including priests and cardi'nals. The public opinion is furious against him, 'because he ought to have cut the matter short at 'first, and not waited twelve months to begin. He has 'been trying at evidence, but can get none sufficient ; 'for what would make fifty divorces in England

*M. Lamartine.

'won't do here there must be the most decided

'proofs.

It is the first cause of the kind attempted in Ra' venna for these two hundred years; for, though they ' often separate, they assign a different motive. You 'know that the continental incontinent are more de'licate than the English, and don't like proclaiming 'their coronation in a court, even when nobody 'doubts it.

'All her relations are furious against him. The 'father has challenged him-a superfluous valour, 'for he don't fight, though suspected of two assassi'nations one of the famous Monzoni of Forli. 'Warning was given me not to take such long rides ' in the Pine Forest without being on my guard; so 'I take my stiletto and a pair of pistols in my pocket 'during my daily rides.

'I won't stir from this place till the matter is settled one way or the other. She is as femininely firm as possible; and the opinion is so much against him, 'that the advocates decline to undertake his cause, 'because they say that he is either a fool or a rogue '-fool, if he did not discover the liaison till now; ' and rogue, if he did know it, and waited, for some 'bad end, to divulge it. In short, there has been ' nothing like it since the days of Guido di Polenta's family, in these parts.

'If the man has me taken off, like Polonius " say, 'he made a good end,"-for a melodrame. The 'principal security is, that he has not the courage to 'spend twenty scudi-the average price of a clean'handed bravo-otherwise there is no want of oppor'tunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, ' with one servant, and sometimes an acquaintance,

'who latterly looks a little queer in solitary bits of 'bushes.

LETTER 377.

'Good bye.-Write to yours ever, &c.'

'Enclosed is something which will interest you, to wit, the opinion of the greatest man of Germany'perhaps of Europe-upon one of the great men of your advertisements (all "famous hands," as Jacob Tonson used to say of his ragamuffins)-in short, a 'critique of Goethe's upon Manfred. There is the original, an English translation, and an Italian one : keep them all in your archives, for the opinions of 'such a man as Goethe, whether favourable or not, are always interesting-and this is more so, as 'favourable. His Faust I never read, for I don't 'know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, 'at Coligny, translated most of it to me viva voce, ' and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was 'the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something else, 'much more than Faustus, that made me write Man'fred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar. Acknowledge this letter.

• Yours ever.

'P.S. I have received Ivanhoe;-good. Pray send me some tooth-powder and tincture of myrrh, by 'Waite, &c. Ricciardetto should have been trans'lated literally, or not at all. As to puffing Whistlecraft, it won't do. I'll tell you why some day or ' other. Cornwall's a poet, but spoilt by the detes'table schools of the day. Mrs. Hemans is a poet also, but too stiltified and apostrophic,-and quite wrong. Men died calmly before the Christian era,

' and since, without Christianity: witness the Romans, and, lately, Thistlewood, Sandt, and Lovelmen who ought to have been weighed down with their 'crimes, even had they believed. A deathbed is a ' matter of nerves and constitution, and not of religion. Voltaire was frightened, Frederick of Prussia not: Christians the same, according to their strength ' rather than their creed. What does H** H* 'mean by his stanza? which is octave got drunk or gone mad. He ought to have his ears boxed with Thor's hammer for rhyming so fantastically.'

The following is the article from Goethe's 'Kunst und Alterthum,' enclosed in this letter. The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these exaggerated, or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures, in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed*, have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long cur

Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of circumstantial wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene ;-his voyages to Sicily,-to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, &c. &c. But the most absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications, are the stories told by Pouqueville, of the poet's religious conferences in the cell of Father Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in which Rizo has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical scene, got up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron and the Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Botzaris, in Missolonghi.

rent upon the continent, that it may be questioned whether the real flesh and blood' hero of these pages, the social, practical-minded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron, may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage.

'GOETHE ON MANFRED.
[1820.]

'Byron's tragedy, Manfred, was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to 'himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourish'ment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made ' use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains 'the same; and it is particularly on this account that 'I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is in this way so completely formed anew, that it would 'be an interesting task for the critic to point out 'not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original in the course of which I cannot deny that 'the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the 'dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem ' and admiration.

'We find thus in this tragedy the quintessence of 'the most astonishing talent born to be its own tor' mentor. The character of Lord Byron's life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appre'ciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly pourtrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for