the truth of her history. Since my arrival at Venice, the lady of the Austrian governor told me that between Verona and Vicenza there are still ruins of the castle of the Montecchi, and a chapel once appertaining to the Capulets. Romeo seems to have been of Vicenza by the tradition; but I was a good deal surprised to find so firm a faith in Bandello's novel, which seems really to have been founded on a fact.

Venice pleases me as much as I expected, and I expected much. It is one of those places which I know before I see them, and has always haunted me the most after the East. I like the gloomy gaiety of their gondolas, and the silence of their canals. I do not even dislike the evident decay of the city, though I regret the singularity of its vanished costume; however, there is much left still; the Carnival, too, is coming.

St. Mark's, and indeed Venice, is most alive at night. The theatres are not open till nine, and the society is proportionably late. All this is to my taste; but most of your countrymen miss and regret the rattle of hackney coaches, without which they can't sleep.

I have got remarkably good apartments in a private house: I see something of the inhabitants (having had a good many letters to some of them): I have got my gondola; I read a little, and luckily could speak Italian (more fluently though than accurately) long ago. I am studying, out of curiosity, the Venetian dialect, which is very naive, and soft, and peculiar, though not at all classical; I go out frequently, and am in very good contentment.

The Helen of Canova (a bust which is in the house of

Madame the Countess d' Albrizzi, whom I know) is, without exception, to my mind, the most perfectly beautiful of human conceptions, and far beyond my ideas of human execution. In this beloved marble view

Above the works and thoughts of Man,
What Nature could, but would not, do,
And Beauty and Canova can!
Beyond Imagination's power,

Beyond the Bard's defeated art,
With Immortality her dower,

Behold the Helen of the heart!

The general race of women appear to be handsome; but in Italy, as on almost all the Continent, the highest orders are by no means a well-looking generation, and indeed reckoned by their countrymen very much otherwise. Some are exceptions, but most of them as ugly as Virtue. herself.

TO JOHN MURRAY

VENICE, February 15, 1817.

I have been uneasy because Mr. Hobhouse told me that his letter or preface was to be addressed to me. Now, he and I are friends of many years; I have many obligations to him, and he none to me which have not been cancelled and more than repaid; but Mr. G[ifford] and I are friends also, and he has moreover been literarily so, through thick

1 "Letters written by an Englishman resident at Paris during the last reign of Napoleon," by John Hobhouse.

and thin, in despite of difference of years, morals, habits, and even politics, which last would, I believe, if they were in heaven, divide the Trinity; and therefore I feel in a very awkward situation between the two, Mr. G. and my friend H., and can only wish that they had no differences, or that such as they have were accommodated. The answer I have not seen, for it is odd enough for people so intimate-but Mr. H. and I are very sparing of our literary confidences. For example, the other day he wished to have a MS. of the 3a canto to read over to his brother, etc., which was refused ;- and I have never seen his journals, nor he mine (I only kept the short one of the mountains for my sister) nor do I think that hardly ever he or I saw any of our own productions previous to their publication.

The article in the E[dinburgh] R[eview] on Coleridge I have not seen; but whether I am attacked in it or not, or in any other of the same journal, I shall never think ill of Mr. Jeffrey on that account, nor forget that his conduct towards me has been certainly most handsome during the last four or more years.

I forgot to mention to you that a kind of Poem1 in dialogue (in blank verse) or drama, from which "The Incantation "2 is an extract, begun last summer in Switzerland, is finished; it is in three acts; but of a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind. Almost all the persons - but two or three are spirits of the earth and air, or

1 "Manfred."

2 The “Incantation" had been published with "The Prisoner of

Chillon" the year previous.

the waters; the scene is in the Alps; the hero a kind of magician, who is tormented by a species of remorse, the cause of which is left half unexplained. He wanders about invoking these spirits, which appear to him, and are of no use; he at last goes to the very abode of the Evil Principle in propria persona, to evocate a ghost, which appears, and gives him an ambiguous and disagreeable answer; and in the 3a act he is found by his attendants dying in a tower where he studied his art. You may perceive by this outline that I have no great opinion of this piece of phantasy: but I have at least rendered it quite impossible for the stage, for which my intercourse with D[rury] Lane has given me the greatest contempt.

I have not even copied it off, and feel too lazy at present to attempt the whole; but when I have, I will send it you, and you may either throw it into the fire or not.

TO JOHN MURRAY

VENICE, February 25, 1817.

Look into Moore's me; in one of the

P. S. Remember me to Mr. G[iffor]d. I have not received your parcel or parcels. (Dr. Moore's) View of Italy for volumes you will find an account of the Doge Valiere (it ought to be Falieri) and his conspiracy, or the motives of it. Get it transcribed for me, and send it in a letter to me soon. I want it, and cannot find so good an account of that business here; though the veiled portrait, and the place where he was once crowned, and afterwards decapitated, still exist and are shown. I have searched all their

histories; but the policy of the old Aristocracy made their writers silent on his motives, which were a private grievance against one of the Patricians.

I mean to write a tragedy upon the subject, which appears to me very dramatic; an old man, jealous, and conspiring against the state of which he was the actually reigning Chief. The last circumstance makes it the most remarkable and only fact of the kind in all history of all nations.

TO THOMAS MOORE

VENICE, February 28, 1817.

And this is your month of going to press by the body of Diana! (a Venetian oath), I feel as anxious— but not fearful for you as if it were myself coming out in a work of humour, which would, you know, be the antipodes of all my previous publications. I don't think you have anything to dread but your own reputation. You must keep up to that. As you never showed me a line of your work, I do not even know your measure; but you must send me a copy by Murray forthwith, and then you shall hear what I think. I dare say you are in a pucker. Of all authors, you are the only really modest one I ever met with, which would sound oddly enough to those who recollect your morals when you were young—that is, when you were extremely youngI don't mean to stigmatise you either with years or morality.

I believe I told you that the E[dinburgh] R[eview]