My digestion is weak; I am too bi"lious," said he, "to eat more than once a-day, and generally live on vegetables. "To be sure, I drink two bottles of "wine at dinner, but they form only a 66 vegetable diet. Just now I live on "claret and soda-water. You are just 66 66 come from Geneva, Shelley tells me. I passed the best part of the summer of "1816 at the Campagna Diodati, and was 66 66 very nearly passing this last there. I went so far as to write to Hentsh the "banker; but Shelley, when he came to "visit me at Ravenna, gave me such a 66 66 66 66 66 66 flattering account of Pisa that I changed my mind. mind. Then it is troublesome to travel so far with so much live and dead stock as I do; and I don't like to leave behind me any of my pets that have been accumulating since I came on the 66 Continent.* One cannot trust to stran 66 gers to take care of them. You will see 66 66 66 66 66 at the farmer's some of my pea-fowls Fletcher tells me that en pension. they are almost as bad fellow-travellers as the monkey †, which I will shew you." Here he led the way to a room, where, after playing with and caressing the creature for some time, he proposed a game of billiards. *He says afterwards in "Don Juan," canto X, stanza L.: "He had a kind of inclination, or Weakness, for what most people deem mere vermin, Live animals.” He afterwards bought another monkey in Pisa, in the street, because he saw it ill-used. I brought the conversation back on Switzerland and his travels, and asked him if he had been in Germany? 66 No," said he, "not even at Trieste. "I hate despotism and the Goths too "much. I have travelled little on the 66 Continent, at least never gone out of my way. This is partly owing to the "indolence of my disposition, partly owing to my incumbrances. 66 66 I had some idea, when at Rome, of visiting Naples, but was at that time anxious "to get back to Venice. But Pæstum cannot surpass the ruins of Agrigentum, which I saw by moonlight; nor Naples, Constantinople. You have no "conception of the beauty of the twelve islands where the Turks have their 66 66 66 country-houses, or of the blue Symple gades against which the Bosphorus beats "with such resistless violence. 66 "Switzerland is a country I have been satisfied with seeing once; Turkey I "could live in for ever. I never forget my predilections. I was in a wretched "state of health, and worse spirits when I 66 was at Geneva; but quiet and the lake, physicians better than Polidori, soon set I never led so moral a life as me up. during my residence in that country; "but I gained no credit by it. Where there is a mortification, there ought to "be reward. On the contrary, there is 66 no story so absurd that they did not "invent at my cost. I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the Lake, 66 my evening drives-I was accused of corrupting all the grisettes in the Rue “Basse. I believe that they looked upon 66 66 me as a man-monster, worse than the piqueur. Somebody possessed Madame de Staël "with an opinion of my immorality. I "used occasionally to visit her at Coppet; "and once she invited me to a family"dinner, and I found the room full of 66 66 strangers, who had come to stare at me as at some outlandish beast in a raree"show. One of the ladies fainted, and "the rest looked as if his Satanic Ma"jesty had been among them. Madame "de Staël took the liberty to read me a "lecture before this crowd; to which I |