LETTER CCCXLIII.

TO MR. HOPPNER.

"October 28th, 1819.

"I have to thank you for your letter, and your compliment to Don Juan. I said nothing to you about it, understanding that it is a sore subject with the moral reader, and has been the cause of a great row; but I am glad you like it. I will say nothing about the shipwreck, except that I hope you think it is as nautical and technical as verse could admit in the octave measure.

"The poem has not sold well, so Murray says-but the best judges &c. say, &c.' so says that worthy man. I have never seen it in print. The Third Canto is in advance about one hundred stanzas ; but the failure of the two first has weakened my estro, and it will never be so good as the two former, unless I get a little more rascalduto in its behalf. I understand the outcry was beyond every thing.-Pretty cant for people who read Tom Jones, and Roderick Random, and the Bath Guide, and Ariosto, and Dryden, and Pope-to say nothing of Little's Poems. Of course I refer to the morality of these works, and not to any pretension of mine to compete with them in any thing but decency. I hope yours is the Paris edition, and that you did not pay the London price. I have seen neither except in the newspapers.

"Pray make my respects to Mrs. H., and take care of your little boy. All my household have the fever and ague, except Fletcher, Allegra, and mysen (as we used to say in Nottinghamshire), and the horses, and Mutz, and Moretto. In the beginning of November, perhaps sooner, I expect to have the pleasure of seeing you. To-day I got drenched by a thunderstorm, and my horse and groom too, and his horse all bemired up to the middle in a cross-road. It was summer at noon, aud at five we were be wintered; but the lightning was sent perhaps to let us know that the summer was not yet over. It is queer weather for the 27th October.

"Yours, &c."

LETTER CCCXLIV.

TO MR. MURRAY.

"Venice, October 29th, 1819.

"Yours of the 15th came yesterday. I am sorry that you do not mention a large letter addressed to your care for Lady Byron, from me, at Bologna, two months ago. Pray tell me, was this letter received and forwarded?

"You say nothing of the vice-consulate for the Ravenna patrician, from which is to be inferred that the thing will not be done.

"I had written about a hundred stanzas of a Third Canto to Don Juan, but the reception of the two first is no encouragement to you nor me to proceed.

"I had also written about 600 lines of poem, the Vision (or Prophecy) of Dante, the subject of a view of Italy in the ages down to the present-supposing Dante to speak in his own person, previous to his death, and embracing all topics in the way of prophecy, like Lycophron's Cassandra; but this and the other are both at a stand-still for the present.

"I gave Moore, who is gone to Rome, my Life in MS. in 78 folio sheets, brought down to 1816. But this I put into his hands for his care, as he has some other MSS. of mine- a Journal kept in 1814, &c. Neither are for publication during my life, but when I am cold, you may do what you please. In the mean time, if you like to read them you may, and show them to any body you like-I care not.

"The Life is Memoranda, and not Confessions. I have left out all my loves (except in a general way,) and many other of the most important things (because I must not compromise other people,) so that it is like the play of Hamletthe part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire.' But you will find many opinions, and some fun, with a detailed account of my marriage and its consequences as true as a party concerned can make such account, for I suppose we are all prejudiced.

"I have never read over this Life since it was written, so that I know not exactly what it may repeat or contain. Moore and I passed some merry days together.

"I probably must return for business in my way to America. Pray, did you get a letter for Mr. Hobhouse, who will have told you the contents ? I understand that the Venezuelan commissioners had orders to treat with emigrants; now I want to go there. I should not make a bad South-American planter, and I should take my natural daughter, Allegra, with

me, and settle. I wrote, at length, to Hobhouse, to get information from Perry, who, I snppose, is the best topographer and trumpeter of the new republicans. Pray write.

you of my whereabouts,' present; they are as usual. publish false Don Juans ;'

"Yours ever, &c.

"P.S. Moore and I did nothing but laugh. He will tell and all my proceedings at this You should not let those fellows but do not put my name, because I mean to cut R-ts up like a gourd in the preface, if I continue the poem."

LETTER CCCXLV.

TO MR. HOPPNER.

"October 29th, 1819.

"The Ferrara story is of a plece with all the rest of the Venetian manufacture,-you may judge: I only changed horses there since I wrote to you, after my visit in June last. 'Convent,' and 'carry off,' quotha! and girl.' I should like to know who has been carried off, except poor dear me. I have been more ravished myself than any body since the Trojan war; but as to the arrest, and its causes, one is as true as the other, and I can account for the invention of neither. I suppose it is some confusion of the tale of the F and of Madame Guiccioli, and half a dozen more; but it is useless to unravel the web, when one has only to brush it away. I shall settle with Master E. who looks very blue at your in-decision, and swears that he is the best arithmetician in Europe; and so I think also, for he makes two and two to be five.

"You may see me next week. I have a horse or two more (five in all,) and I shall repossess myself of Lido, and I will rise earlier, and will go and shake our livers over the beach, as heretofore, if you like-and we will make the Adriatic roar again with our hatred of that now empty oyster-shell, without its pearl, the city of Venice.

"Murray sent me a letter yesterday: the impostors have published two new Third Cantos of Don Juan:-the devil take the impudence of some blackguard bookseller or other therefor! Perhaps I did not make myself understood; he told me the sale had been great, 1200 out of 1500 quarter, I believe, (which is nothing after selling 13,000 of the Corsair in one day ;) but that the best judges, &c.' had said it was very fine, and clever, and particularly good English, and

poetry, and all those consolatory things, which are not, however, worth a single copy to a bookseller: and as to the author, of course I am in a d--ned passion at the bad taste of the times, and swear there is nothing like posterity, who, of course, must know more of the matter than their grandfathers. There has been an eleventh commandment to the women not to read it, and what is still more extraordinary, they seem not to have broken it. But that can be of little import to them, poor things, for the reading or non-reading a book will never

"Count G. comes to Venice next week, and I am requested to consign his wife to him, which shall be done. What you say of the long evenings at the Mira, or Venice, reminds me of what Curran said to Moore:-'So I hear you have married a pretty woman, and a very good creature, tooan excellent creature. Pray-um!-how do you pass your evenings ? It is a devil of a question that, and perhaps as easy to answer with a wife as with a mistress.

"If you go to Milan, pray leave at least a Vice-Consulthe only vice that will ever be wanting in Venice. D'Orville is a good fellow. But you shall go to England in the spring with me, and plant Mrs. Hoppner at Berne with her relations for a few months. I wish you had been hear (at Venice, I mean, not the Mira) when Moore was here-we were very merry and tipsy. He hated Venice, by the way, and swore it was a sad place †*

"So Madame Albrizzi's death is in danger-poor woman! • Moore told me that at Geneva they had made a devil of a story of the Fornaretta:- Young lady seduced !-subsequeut abandonment!leap into the Grand Canal!-and hear being in the hospital of fous in consequence !' I should like to know who was nearest being made for,' and be d-d to them! Don't you think me in the interesting character of a very ill-used gentleman? I hope your little boy is well. Allegrina is flourishing like a pomegranate blossom.

LETTER CCCXLVI.

TO MR. MURRAY.

"Yours, &c.

"Venice, November 8th, 1819:

"Mr. Hoppner has lent me a copy of Don Juan,' Paris edition, which he tells me is read in Switzerland by clergymen and ladies with considerable approbation. In the Second Canto you must alter the 49th stanza to

I beg to say that this report of my opinion of Venice is coloured somewhat too deeply by the feelings of the reporter.

"Twas twilight, and the sunless day went down
Over the waste of waters, like a veil

Which if withdrawn would but disclose the frown
Of one whose hate is mask'd but to assail;
Thus to their hopeless eyes the night was shown,
And grimly darkled o'er their faces pale

And the dim desolate deep; twelve days had Fear
Been their familiar, and now Death was here.

"I have been ill these eight days with a tertian fever, caught in the country on horseback in a thunder-storm. Yesterday I had the fourth attack: the two last were very smart, the first day as well as the last being proceeded by vomiting. It is the fever of the place and the season. I feel weakened, but not unwell, in the intervals, except headache and lassitude.

"Count Guiccioli has arrived in Venice, and has presented his spouse (who had preceded him two months for her health and the prescriptions of Dr. Aglietti) with a paper of conditions, regulations of hours and conduct, and morals, &c. &c. &c., which he insists on her accepting, and she persists in refusing. I am expressly, it should seem, excluded by this treaty, as an indespensable preliminary; so that they are in high dissension, and what the result may be, I know not, particularly as they are consulting friends.

"To-night, as Countess Guiccioli observed me poring over 'Don Juan,' she stumbled by mere chance on the 137th stanza of the First Canto, and asked me what it meant. I told her, 'Nothing, but your husband is coming." As I said this in Italian with some emphasis, she started up in a fright, and said, 'Oh, my God is he coming ?' thinking it was her own, who either was or ought to have been at the theatre. You may suppose we laughed when she found out the mistake. You will be amused, as I was;-it happened not three hours ago.

"I wrote to you last week, but have added nothing to the Third Canto since my fever, nor to 'The Prophecy of Dante.' Of the former there are about 100 octaves done; of the latter about 500 lines-perhaps more. Moore saw the third Juan, as far as it then went. I do not know if my fever will let me go on with either, and the tertian lasts, they say, a good while. I had it in Malta on my way home, and the malaria fever in Greece the year before that. The Venetian is not very fierce, but I was delirious one of the nights with it, for an hour or two, and, on my senses coming back, found Fletcher sobbing on one side of the bed, and La Countessa Guiccioli weeping on the

The following curious particulars of his delirium are given by Madame Guiccioli :-" At the beginning of winter Count Guiccioli came from Ravenna to fetch me. When he arrived, Lord Byron was ill of a fever, occasioned by his having got

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