  On the 25th of April, 1816, Byron embarked for Ostend. From the "burning marl" of the staring streets he planted his foot again on the dock with a genuine exultation. Once more upon the waters, yet once more, But he brought with him a relic of English extravagance, sotting out on his land travels in a huge coach, copied from that of Napoleon taken at Genappe, and being accompanied by Fletcher, Rushton, Berger, a Swiss, and Polidori, a physician of Italian descent, son of Alfieri's secretary, a man of some talent but indiscreet. A question arises as to the source from which he obtained the means for these and subsequent luxuries, in striking contrast with Goldsmith's walking-stick, knapsack, and flute. Byron's financial affairs are almost inextricably confused. We can, for instance, nowhere find a clear statement of the result of the suit regarding the Rochdale Estates, save that he lost it before the Court of Exchequer, and that his appeal to the House of Lords was still unsettled in 1822. The sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman in 1818, for 90,000 l., went mostly to pay off mortgages and debts. In April, 1819, Mrs. Leigh writes, after a last sigh over this event:—"Sixty thousand pounds was secured by his (Byron's) marriage settlement, the interest of which he receives for life, and which ought to make him very comfortable." This is unfortunately decisive of the fact that he did not in spirit adhere to the resolution expressed to Moore never to touch a farthing of his wife's money, though we may accept his statement to Medwin, that he twice repaid the dowry of 10,000 l. brought to him at the marriage, as in so far diminishing the obligation. None of the capital of Lady Byron's family came under his control till 1822, when, on the death of her mother, Lady Noel, Byron arranged the appointment of referees, Sir Francis Burdett on his behalf, Lord Dacre on his wife's. The result was an equal division of a property worth about 7000 l a year. While in Italy the poet received besides about 10,000 l for his writings—4000 l. being given for Childe Harold (iii., iv.), and Manfred. "Ne pas Être dupe" was one of his determinations, and, though he began by caring little for making money, he was always fond of spending it. "I tell you it is too much," he said to Murray, in returning a thousand guineas for the Corinth and Partsina. Hodgson, Moore, Bland, Thomas Ashe, the family of Lord Falkland, the British Consul at Venice, and a host of others, were ready to testify to his superb munificence. On the other hand, he would stint his pleasures, or his benevolences, which were among them, for no one; and when he found that to spend money he had to make it, he saw neither rhyme nor reason in accepting less than his due. In 1817 he begins to dun Murray, declaring, with a frankness in which we can find no fault, "You offer 1500 guineas for the new canto (C. H., iv.). I won't take it. I ask 2500 guineas for it, which you will either give or not, as you think proper." During the remaining years of his life he grew more and more exact, driving hard bargains for his houses, horses, and boats, and fitting himself, had he lived, to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the newly-liberated State, from which he took a bond securing a fair interest for his loan. He made out an account in £. s. d. against the ungrateful Dallas, and when Leigh Hunt threatened to sponge upon him he got a harsh reception; but there is nothing to countenance the view that Byron was ever really possessed by the "good old gentlemanly vice" of which lie wrote. The Skimpoles and Chadbands of the world are always inclined to talk of filthy lucre: it is equally a fashion of really lavish people to boast that they are good men of business. We have only a few glimpses of Byron's progress. At Brussels the Napoleonic coach was set aside for a more serviceable caleche. During his stay in the Belgian capital lie paid a visit to the scene of Waterloo, wrote the famous stanzas beginning, "Stop, for thy tread is on an empire's dust!" and in unpatriotic prose, recorded his impressions of a plain which appeared to him to "want little but a better cause" to make it vie in interest with those of Platea and Marathon. The rest of his journey lay up the Rhine to Basle, thence to Berne, Lausanne, and Geneva, where he settled for a time at the HÔtel Secheron, on the western shore of the lake. Here began the most interesting literary relationship of his life, for here he first came in contact with the impassioned Ariel of English verse, Percy Bysshe Shelley. They lived in proximity after they left the hotel, Shelley's headquarters being at Mont AlÉgre, and Byron's for the remainder of the summer at the Villa Diodati; and their acquaintance rapidly ripened into an intimacy which, with some interruptions, extended over the six remaining years of their joint lives. The place for an estimate of their mutual influence belongs to the time of their Italian partnership. Meanwhile, we hear of them mainly as fellow-excursionists about the lake, which on one occasion departing from its placid poetical character, all but swallowed them both, along with Hobhouse, off Meillerie. "The boat," says Byron, "was nearly wrecked near the very spot where St. Preux and Julia were in danger of being drowned. It would have been classical to have been lost there, but not agreeable. I ran no risk, being so near the rocks and a good swimmer; but our party wore wet and incommoded." The only anxiety of Shelley, who could not swim, was, that no one else should risk a life for his. Two such revolutionary or such brave poets were, in all probability, never before nor since in a storm in a boat together. During this period Byron complains of being still persecuted. "I was in a wretched state of health and worse spirits when I was in Geneva; but quiet and the lake—better physicians than Polidori—soon set me up. I never led so moral a life as during my residence in that country, but I gained no credit by it. On the contrary, there is no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, that must have had very distorted optics. I was waylaid in my evening drives. I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster." Shortly after his arrival in Switzerland he contracted an intimacy with Miss Clairmont, a daughter of Godwin's second wife, and consequently a connexion by marriage of the Shelleys, with whom she was living, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Allegra, at Great Marlow, in February, 1817. The noticeable events of the following two months are a joint excursion to Chamouni, and a visit in July to Madame de StaËl at Coppet, in the course of which he met Frederick Schlegel. During a wet week, when the families were reading together some German ghost stories, an idea occurred of imitating them, the main result of which was Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein. Byron contributed to the scheme a fragment of The Vampire, afterwards completed and published in the name of his patron by Polidori. The eccentricities of this otherwise amiable physician now began to give serious annoyance; his jealousy of Shelley grew to such a pitch that it resulted in the doctor's giving a challenge to the poet, at which the latter only laughed; but Byron, to stop further outbreaks of the kind, remarked, "Recollect that, though Shelley has scruples about duelling, I have none, and shall be at all times ready to take his place." Polidori had ultimately to be dismissed, and, after some years of vicissitude, committed suicide. The Shelleys left for England in September, and Byron made an excursion with Hobhouse through the Bernese Oberland. They went by the Col de Jaman and the Simmenthal to Thun; then up the valley to the Staubbach, which he compares to the tail of the pale horse in the Apocalypse—not a very happy, though a striking comparison. Thence they proceeded over the Wengern to Grindelwald and the Rosenlau glacier; then back by Berne, Friburg, and Yverdun to Diodati. The following passage in reference to this tour may be selected as a specimen of his prose description, and of the ideas of mountaineering before the days of the Alpine Club:— "Before ascending the mountain, went to the torrent again, the sun upon it forming a rainbow of the lower part, of all colours but principally purple and gold, the bow moving as you move. I never saw anything like this; it is only in the sunshine…. Left the horses, took off my coat, and went to the summit, 7000 English feet above the level of the sea, and 5000 feet above the valley we left in the morning. On one side our view comprised the Jungfrau, with all her glaciers; then the Dent d'Argent, shining like truth; then the Eighers and the Wetterhorn. Heard the avalanches falling every five minutes. From where we stood on the Wengern Alp we had all these in view on one side; on the other, the clouds rose up from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices, like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide; it was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance…. Arrived at the Grindelwald; dined; mounted again, and rode to the higher glacier—like a frozen hurricane; starlight beautiful, but a devil of a path. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless; done by a single winter. Their appearance reminded me of me and my family." Students of Manfred will recognize whole sentences, only slightly modified in its verse. Though Byron talks with contempt of authorship, there is scarce a fine phrase in his letters or journal which is not pressed into the author's service. He turns his deepest griefs to artistic gain, and uses five or six times for literary purposes the expression which seems to have dropped from him naturally about his household gods being shivered on his hearth. His account of this excursion concludes with a passage equally characteristic of his melancholy and incessant self-consciousness:— "In the weather for this tour, I have been very fortunate…. I was disposed to be pleased. I am a lover of nature, &c…. But in all this the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me." Such egotism in an idle man would only provoke impatience; but Byron was, during the whole of this period, almost preternaturally active. Detained by bad weather at Ouchy for two days (Juno 26, 27), he wrote the Prisoner of Chillon, which, with its noble introductory sonnet on Bonnivard, in some respects surpasses any of his early romances. The opening lines,— Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls; bring before us in a few words the conditions of a hopeless bondage. The account of the prisoner himself, and of the lingering deaths of the brothers; the first frenzy of the survivor, and the desolation which succeeds it— I only loved: I only drew the bird's song breaking on the night of his solitude; his growing enamoured of despair, and regaining his freedom with a sigh, are all strokes from a master hand. From the same place, at the same date, he announces to Murray the completion of the third canto of Childe Harold. The productiveness of July is portentous. During that month he wrote the Monody on Sheridan, The Dream, Churchill's Grave, the Sonnet to Lake Leman, Could I remount the River of my Years, part of Manfred, Prometheus, the Stanzas to Augusta, beginning, My sister! My sweet sister! If a name and the terrible dream of Darkness, which at least in the ghastly power of the close, where the survivors meet by the lurid light of a dim altar fire, and die of each other's hideousness, surpasses Campbell's Last Man[1]. At Lausanne the poet made a pilgrimage to the haunts of Gibbon, broke a sprig from his acacia-tree, and carried off some rose leaves from his garden. Though entertaining friends, among them Mr. M.G. Lewis and Scrope Davies, he systematically shunned "the locust swarm of English tourists," remarking on their obtrusive platitudes; as when he heard one of them at Chamouni inquire, "Did you ever see anything more truly rural?" Ultimately he got tired of the Calvinistic Genevese—one of whom is said to have swooned as he entered the room—and early in October set out with Hobhouse for Italy. They crossed the Simplon, and proceeded by the Lago Maggiore to Milan, admiring the pass, but slighting the somewhat hothouse beauties of the Borromean Islands. From Milan he writes, pronouncing its cathedral to be only a little inferior to that of Seville, and delighted with "a correspondence, all original and amatory, between Lucretia Borgia and Cardinal Bembo." He secured a lock of the golden hair of the Pope's daughter, and wished himself a cardinal. [Footnote 1: This only appeared in 1831, but Campbell claims to have given Byron in conversation the suggestion of the subject.] At Verona, Byron dilates on the amphitheatre, as surpassing anything he had seen even in Greece, and on the faith of the people in the story of Juliet, from whose reputed tomb he sent some pieces of granite to Ada and his nieces. In November we find him settled in Venice, "the greenest isle of his imagination." There he began to form those questionable alliances which are so marked a feature of his life, and so frequent a theme in his letters, that it is impossible to pass them without notice. The first of his temporary idols was Mariana Segati, "the wife of a merchant of Venice," for some time his landlord. With this woman, whom he describes as an antelope with oriental eyes, wavy hair, voice like the cooing of a dove, and the spirit of a Bacchante, he remained on terms of intimacy for about eighteen months, during which their mutual devotion was only disturbed by some outbursts of jealousy. In December the poet took lessons in Armenian, glad to find in the study something craggy to break his mind upon. Ho translated into that language a portion of St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. Notes on the carnival, praises of Christabel, instructions about the printing of Childe Harold (iii.), protests against the publication under his name of some spurious "domestic poems," and constant references, doubtfully domestic, to his Adriatic lady, fill up the records of 1816. On February 15, 1817, he announces to Murray the completion of the first sketch of Manfred, and alludes to it in a bantering manner as "a kind of poem in dialogue, of a wild metaphysical and inexplicable kind;" concluding, "I have at least rendered it quite impossible for the stage, for which my intercourse with Drury Lane has given me the greatest contempt." About this time Byron seems to have entertained the idea of returning to England in the spring, i.e. after a year's absence. This design, however, was soon set aside, partly in consequence of a slow malarian fever, by which he was prostrated for several weeks. On his partial recovery, attributed to his having had neither medicine nor doctor, and a determination to live till he had "put one or two people out of the world," he started on an expedition to Rome. His first stage was Arqua; then Ferrara, where he was inspired, by a sight of the Italian poet's prison, with the Lament of Tasso; the next, Florence, where he describes himself as drunk with the beauty of the galleries. Among the pictures, he was most impressed with the mistresses of Raphael and Titian, to whom, along with Giorgione, he is always reverential; and he recognized in Santa Croce the Westminster Abbey of Italy. Passing through Foligno, he reached his destination early in May, and met his old friends, Lord Lansdowne and Hobhouse. The poet employed his short time at Rome in visiting on horseback the most famous sites in the city and neighbourhood—as the Alban Mount, Tivoli, Frascati, the Falls of Terni, and the Clitumnus—re-casting the crude first draft of the third act of Manfred, and sitting for his bust to Thorwaldsen. Of this sitting the sculptor afterwards gave some account to his compatriot, Hans Andersen: "Byron placed himself opposite to me, but at once began to put on a quite different expression from that usual to him. 'Will you not sit still?' said I. 'You need not assume that look.' 'That is my expression,' said Byron. 'Indeed,' said I; and I then represented him as I wished. When the bust was finished he said, 'It is not at all like me; my expression is more unhappy.'" West, the American, who five years later painted his lordship at Leghorn, substantiates the above half-satirical anecdote, by the remark, "He was a bad sitter; he assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for Chlde Harold." Thorwaldsen's bust, the first cast of which was sent to Hobhouse, and pronounced by Mrs. Leigh to be the best of the numerous likenesses of her brother, was often repeated. Professor Brandes, of Copenhagen, introduces his striking sketch of the poet by a reference to the model, that has its natural place in the museum named from the great sculptor whose genius had flung into the clay the features of a character so unlike his own. The bust, says the Danish critic, at first sight impresses one with an undefinable classic grace; on closer examination the restlessness of a life is reflected in a brow over which clouds seem to hover, but clouds from which we look for lightnings. The dominant impression of the whole is that of some irresistible power (Unwiderstehlichkeit). Thorwaldsen, at a much later date (1829-1833) executed the marble statue, first intended for the Abbey, which is now to be seen in the library of Trinity College, in evidence that Cambridge is still proud of her most brilliant son. Towards the close of the month—after almost fainting at the execution by guillotine of three bandits—he professes impatience to get back to Mariana, and early in the next we find him established with her near Venice, at the villa of La Mira, where for some time he continued to reside. His letters of June refer to the sale of Newstead, the mistake of Mrs. Leigh and others in attributing to him the Tales of a Landlord, the appearance of Lalla Rookh, preparations for Marino Faliero, and the progress of Childe Harold iv. This poem, completed in September, and published early in 1818 (with a dedication to Hobhouse, who had supplied most of the illustrative notes), first made manifest the range of the poet's power. Only another slope of ascent lay between him and the pinnacle, over which shines the red star of Cain. Had Lord Byron's public career closed when he left England, he would have been remembered for a generation as the author of some musical minor verses, a clever satire, a journal in verse exhibiting flashes of genius, and a series of fascinating romances—also giving promise of higher power—which had enjoyed a marvellous popularity. The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold placed him on another platform, that of the Dii Majores of English verse. These cantos are separated from their predecessors, not by a stage, but by a gulf. Previous to their publication he had only shown how far the force of rhapsody could go; now he struck with his right hand, and from the shoulder. Knowledge of life and study of Nature were the mainsprings of a growth which the indirect influence of Wordsworth, and the happy companionship of Shelley, played their part in fostering. Faultlessness is seldom a characteristic of impetuous verse, never of Byron's; and even in the later parts of the Childe there are careless lines, and doubtful images. "Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again," looking "pale and interesting;" but we are soon refreshed by a higher note. No familiarity can distract from "Waterloo," which holds its own by Barbour's "Bannockburn," and Scott's "Flodden." Sir Walter, referring to the climax of the opening, and the pathetic lament of the closing lines, generously doubts whether any verses in English surpass them in vigour. There follows "The Broken Mirror," extolled by Jeffrey with an appreciation of its exuberance of fancy, and negligence of diction; and then the masterly sketch of Napoleon, with the implied reference to the writer at the end. The descriptions in both cantos perpetually rise from a basis of rhetoric to a real height of poetry. Byron's "Rhine" flows, like the river itself, in a stream of "exulting and abounding" stanzas. His "Venice" may be set beside the masterpieces of Ruskin's prose. They are together the joint pride of Italy and England. The tempest in the third canto is in verse a splendid microcosm of the favourites, if not the prevailing mood, of the writer's mind. In spite of manifest flaws, the nine stanzas beginning "It is the hush of night," have enough in them to feed a high reputation. The poet's dying day, his sun and moon contending over the Rhaetian hill, his Thrasymene, Clitumnus, and Velino, show that his eye has grown keener, and his imagery at least more terse, and that he can occasionally forgot himself in his surroundings. The Drachenfels, Ehrenbreitstein, the Alps, Lake Leman, pass before us like a series of dissolving views. But the stability of the book depends on its being a Temple of Fame, as well as a Diorama of Scenery. It is no mere versified Guide, because every resting-place in the pilgrimage is made interesting by association with illustrious memories. Coblontz introduces the tribute to Marceau; Clarens an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau; Lausanne and Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire. A tomb in Arqua suggests Petrarch; the grass-grown streets of Ferrara lead in the lines on Tasso; the white walls of the Etrurian Athens bring back Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard of the hundred tales, and Dante, "buried by the upbraiding shore," and— The starry Galileo and his woes. Byron has made himself so master of the glories and the wrecks of Rome, that almost everything else that has been said of them seems superfluous. Hawthorne, in his Marble Fawn, comes nearest to him; but Byron's Gladiator and Apollo, if not his Laocoon, are unequalled. "The voice of Marius," says Scott, "could not sound more deep and solemn among the ruins of Carthage, than the strains of the pilgrim among the broken shrines and fallen statues of her subduer." As the third canto has a fitting close with the poet's pathetic remembrance of his daughter, so the fourth is wound up with consummate art,—the memorable dirge on the Princess Charlotte being followed by the address to the sea, which, enduring unwrinkled through all its ebbs and flows, seems to mock at the mutability of human life. Manfred, his witch drama, as the author called it, has had a special attraction for inquisitive biographers, because it has been supposed in some dark manner to reveal the secrets of his prison house. Its lines have been tortured, like the witches of the seventeenth century, to extort from them the meaning of the "all nameless hour," and every conceivable horror has been alleged as its motif. On this subject Goethe writes with a humorous simplicity: "This singularly intellectual poet has extracted from my Faust the strongest nourishment for his hypochondria; but he has made use of the impelling principles for his own purposes…. When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one to whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, but these spirits have haunted him all his life. This romantic incident explains innumerable allusions," e.g.,— I have shed Were it not for the fact that the poet had never seen the city in question when he wrote the poem, this explanation would be more plausible than most others, for the allusions are all to some lady who has been done to death. Galt asserts that the plot turns on a tradition of unhallowed necromancy—a human sacrifice, like that of Antinous attributed to Hadrian. Byron himself says it has no plot, but he kept teasing his questioners with mysterious hints, e.g. "It was the Staubbach and the Jungfrau, and something else more than Faustus, which made me write Manfred;" and of one of his critics he says to Murray, "It had a better origin than he can devise or divine, for the soul of him." In any case most methods of reading between its lines would, if similarly applied, convict Sophocles, Schiller, and Shelley of incest, Shakespeare of murder, Milton of blasphemy, Scott of forgery, Marlowe and Goethe of compacts with the devil. Byron was no dramatist, but he had wit enough to vary at least the circumstances of his projected personality. The memories of both Fausts—the Elizabethan and the German—mingle, in the pages of this piece, with shadows of the author's life; but to these it never gives, nor could be intended to give, any substantial form. Manfred is a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, half animated by vague personifications and sensational narrative. Like Harold, and Scott's Marmion, it just misses being a great poem. The Coliseum is its masterpiece of description, the appeal, "Astarte, my beloved, speak to me," its nearest approach to pathos. The lonely death of the hero makes an effective close to the moral tumult of the preceding scenes. But the reflections, often striking, are seldom absolutely fresh: that beginning, The mind, which is immortal, makes itself is transplanted from Milton with as little change as Milton made in transplanting it from Marlowe. The author's own favourite passage, the invocation to the sun (act iii., sc. 2), has some sublimity, marred by lapses. The lyrics scattered through the poem sometimes open well, e.g.,— Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains; but they cannot sustain themselves like true song-birds, and fall to the ground like spent rockets. This applies to Byron's lyrics generally; turn to the incantation in the Deformed Transformed: the first line and a half are in tune,— Beautiful shadow of Thetis's boy, Nor Sternhold nor Hopkins has more ruthlessly outraged our ears than the next two— From the red earth, like Adam, thy likeness I shape, Of his songs: "There be none of Beauty's daughters," "She walks in beauty," "Maid of Athens," "I enter thy garden of roses," the translation "Sons of the Greeks," and others, have a flow and verve that it is pedantry to ignore; but in general Byron was too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrist. Some of the greatest have lived wild lives, but their wings were not weighted with the lead of the love of the world. The summer and early months of the autumn of 1817 were spent at La Mira, and much of the poet's time was occupied in riding along the banks of the Brenta, often in the company of the few congenial Englishmen who came in his way; others, whom he avoided, avenged themselves by retailing stories, none of which wore "too improbable for the craving appetites of their slander-loving countrymen." In August he received a visit from Mr. Hobhouse, and on this occasion drew up the remarkable document afterwards given to Mr. M. G. Lewis for circulation in England, which appeared in the Academy of October 9th, 1869. In this document he says, "It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared their lips to be sealed up on the cause of the separation between her and myself. If their lips are sealed up they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can confer upon me will be to open them." He goes on to state, that he repents having consented to the separation—will be glad to cancel the deed, or to go before any tribunal, to discuss the matter in the most public manner; adding, that Mr. Hobhouse (in whose presence he was writing) proposed, on his part, to go into court, and ending with a renewed asseveration of his ignorance of the allegations against him, and his inability to understand for what purpose they had been kept back, "unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence." Hobhouse, and others, during the four succeeding years, ineffectually endeavoured to persuade the poet to return to England. Moore and others insist that Byron's heart was at home when his presence was abroad, and that, with all her faults, he loved his country still. Leigh Hunt, on the contrary, asserts that he cared nothing for England or its affairs. Like many men of genius, Byron was never satisfied with what he had at the time. "Romae Tibur amem ventosus Tibure Romam." At Seaham he is bored to death, and pants for the excitement of the clubs; in London society he longs for a desert or island in the Cyclades; after their separation, he begins to regret his wife; after his exile, his country. "Where," he exclaimed to Hobhouse, "is real comfort to be found out of England?" He frequently fell into the mood in which he wrote the verse,— Yet I was born where men are proud to be, But the following, to Murray (June 7, 1819), is equally sincere. "Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments of Bologna; for instance— 'Martini Luigi 'Lucrezia Picini Can anything be more full of pathos? These few words say all that can be said or sought; the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was rest, and this they implore. There is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and death-like prayer that can arise from the grave—'implora pace.' "I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigner's burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see these two words, and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of pickling and bringing me home to Clod, or Blunderbuss Hall. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country." Hunt's view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer the truth than Moore's; for with all Byron's insight into Italian vice, he hated more the master vice of England—hypocrisy; and much of his greatest, and in a sense latest, because unfinished work, is the severest, as it might be the wholesomest, satire ever directed against a great nation since the days of Juvenal and Tacitus. In September (1817) Byron entered into negotiations, afterwards completed, for renting a country house among the Euganean hills near Este, from Mr. Hoppner, the English Consul at Venice, who bears frequent testimony to his kindness and courtesy. In October we find him settled for the winter in Venice, where he first occupied his old quarters, in the Spezieria, and afterwards hired one of the palaces of the Countess Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. Between this mansion, the cottage at Este, and the villa of La Mira, he divided his time for the next two years. During the earlier part of his Venetian career he had continued to frequent the salon of the Countess Albrizzi, where he met with people of both sexes of some rank and standing who appreciated his genius, though some among them fell into absurd mistakes. A gentleman of the company informing the hostess, in answer to some inquiry regarding Canova's busts, that Washington, the American President, was shot in a duel by Burke, "What, in the name of folly, are you thinking of?" said Byron, perceiving that the speaker was confounding Washington with Hamilton, and Burke with Burr. He afterwards transferred himself to the rival coterie of the Countess Benzoni, and gave himself up with little reserve to the intrigues which cast discredit on this portion of his life. Nothing is so conducive to dissipation as despair, and Byron had begun to regard the Sea-Cybele as a Sea-Sodom—when he wrote, "To watch a city die daily, as she does, is a sad contemplation. I sought to distract my mind from a sense of her desolation and my own solitude, by plunging into a vortex that was anything but pleasure." In any case, he forsook the "Dame," and, by what his biographer calls a "descent in the scale of refinement, for which nothing but the wayward state of his mind can account," sought the companions of his leisure hours among the wearers of the "fazzioli." The carnivals of the years 1818, 1819, mark the height of his excesses. Early in the former, Mariana Segati fell out of favour, owing to Byron's having detected her in selling the jewels he had given as presents, and so being led to suspect a large mercenary element in her devotion. To her succeeded Margarita Cogni, the wife of a baker who proved as accommodating as his predecessor, the linen-draper. This woman was decidedly a character, and SeÑor Castelar has almost elevated her into a heroine. A handsome virago, with brown shoulders, and black hair, endowed with the strength of an Amazon, "a face like Faustina's, and the figure of a Juno—tall and energetic as a pythoness," she quartered herself for twelve months in the palace as "Donna di governo," and drove the servants about without let or hindrance. Unable to read or write she intercepted his lordship's letters to little purpose; but she had great natural business talents, reduced by one half the expenses of his household, kept everything in good order, and, when her violences roused his wrath, turned it off with some ready retort or witticism. She was very devout, and would cross herself three times at the Angelus. One instance, of a different kind of devotion, from Byron's own account, is sufficiently graphic:—"In the autumn one day, going to the Lido with my gondoliers, we were overtaken by a heavy squall, and the gondola put in peril, hats blown away, boat filling, oar lost, tumbling sea, thunder, rain in torrents, and wind unceasing. On our return, after a tight struggle, I found her on the open stops of the Mocenigo Palace on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her dress about her thin figure, and the lightning flashing round her, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the Sibyl of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment, except ourselves. On seeing me safe she did not wait to greet me, as might have been expected; but, calling out to me, 'Ah! can' della Madonna, xe esto il tempo per andar' al' Lido,' ran into the house, and solaced herself with scolding the boatmen for not foreseeing the 'temporale.' Her joy at seeing me again was moderately mixed with ferocity, and gave me the idea of a tigress over her recovered cubs." |
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