sue happened to be leaning on my arm. You may suppose what a cursed noise this made; but this is only one of her pranks.

"At last she quarrelled with her husband, and one evening ran away to my house. I told her this would not do she said she would lie in the street, but not | go back to him; that he beat her, (the gentle tigress!) spent her money, and scandalously neglected her. As it was midnight, I let her stay, and next day there was no moving her at all. Her husband came, roaring and crying, and entreating her to come back:-not she! He then applied to the police, and they applied to me: I told them and her husband to take her; I did not want her; she had come, and I could not fling her out of the window; but they might conduct her through that or the door if they chose it. She went before the commissary, but was obliged to return with that becco ettico,' as she called the poor man, who had a phthisic. In a few days she ran away again. After a precious piece of work, she fixed herself in my house, really and truly without my consent; but, owing to my indolence, and not being able to keep my countenance for if I began in a rage, she always finished by making me laugh with some Venetian pantaloonery or another; and the gipsy knew this well enough, as well as her other powers of persuasion, and exerted them with the usual tact and success of all she-things;-high and low, they are all alike for that.

“Madame Benzoni also took her under her protection, and then her head turned. She was always in extremes, either crying or laughing, and so fierce when angered, that she was the terror of men, women, and children-for she had the strength of an Amazon, with the temper of Medea. She was a fine animal, but quite untameable. I was the only person that could at all keep her in any order, and when she saw me really angry (which they tell me is a savage sight), she subsided. But she had a thousand fooleries. In her fazziolo, the dress of the lower orders, she looked beautiful; but, alas! she longed for a hat and feathers; and all I could say or do (and I said much) could not prevent this travestie. I put the first into the fire; but I got tired of burning them before she did of buying them, so that she made herself a figure-for they did not at all become her.

"Then she would have her gowns with a tail-like a lady, forsooth; nothing would serve her but 'l'abita colla coua,' or cua (that is the Venetian for 'la cola,' the tail or train), and as her cursed pronunciation of the word made me laugh, there was an end of all controversy, and she dragged this diabolical tail after her every where

"In the mean time, she beat the women and stopped my letters. I found her one day pondering over one. She used to try to find out by their shape whether they were feminine or no; and she used to lament her ignorance, and actually studied her alphabet, on pur

pose (as she declared) to open all letters addressed to me and read their contents.

"I must not omit to do justice to her housekeeping qualities. After she came into my house as 'donna di governo,' the expenses were reduced to less than half,-the apartments were kept in order, and every thing and every body else, except herself.

"That she had a sufficient regard for me in her wild way, I had many reasons to believe. I will mention one. 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, night coming, and wind unceasing. On our return, after a tight struggle, I found her on the open steps 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 and breast. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and the waves rolling at her feet, 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, ne esto il tempo per andar' al' Lido!' (Ah! dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to Lido!) ran into the house, and solaced herself with scolding the boatmen for not foreseeing the temporale.' I am told by the servants that she had only been prevented from coming in a boat to look after me, by the refusal of all the gondoliers of the canal to put out into the harbour in such a moment; and that then she sate down on the steps in all the thickest of the squall, and would neither be removed nor comforted. Her joy at seeing me again was moderately mixed with ferocity, and gave me the idea of a tigress over her recovered cubs. "But her reign drew near a close. She became quite ungovernable some months after, and a concurrence of complaints, some true, and many false-‘a favourite has no friends'--determined me to part with her. I told her quietly that she must return home (she had acquired a sufficient provision for herself and mother, etc. in my service), and she refused to quit the house. I was firm, and she went threatening knives and revenge. I told her that I had seen knives drawn before her time, and that if she chose to begin, there was a knife, and fork also, at her service on the table, and that intimidation would not do. The next day, while I was at dinner, she walked in (having broken open a glass door that led from the hall below to the staircase, by way of prologue), and, advancing straight up to the table, snatched the knife from my hand, cutting me slightly in the thumb in the operation. Whed

that the best course I could adopt, both for your peace and that of all your family, would have been to depart, and go far, far away from you; since to have been near, and not approach you, would have been for me impossible. You have, however, decided that I am to return to Ravenna; I shall accordingly return, and shall do and be all that you wish. I cannot say more."-Nor was it possible to say this in a more true and touching tone. There is, indeed, a kind of quiet, tender, and melancholy plaintiveness in the short address I have quoted, which sinks into the heart, and tells us how its writer did not expect happiness in the destiny that he pursued, and had endured misery in struggling against it; and so in the subsequent pages of his connection with this beloved lady, there seems softness and a resignation in his character-a sort of delivering himself up to fate, which in no other time or circumstance of his life was ever apparent.

At Ravenna, this time, he staid a considerable period, and seemed every day to contract a fonder attachment for the deep woods and dismantled quietude of the place. Here he composed Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, the Foscari, Cain, the Prophecy of Dante, Translation from Pulci, and the third and fourth cantos of Don Juan.

In the summer of 1820, Countess Guiccioli was separated from her husband, not at his, the husband's suit, which may seem extraordinary, but at her own. This separation, however, did originate or at least had the appearance of being caused by the Count's jealousy; although a separation had been a few years before granted at Rome on the solicitation of the Countess, from the same cause, and it was only after repeated protestations of a change of conduct on the part of her husband that she consented to return to him at Venice. Notwithstanding this, however, he now began most unconscionably to murmur, and insisted that the Countess should not receive Byron in her apartments, although he resided in the palace;-a sufficient cause for which he described himself to have been the scandalous or scandalized eye-witness of. The whole society of Ravenna, shocked at his indelicacy, rose up against him; the most indulgent said that, after having submitted so long, it was too bad at last to protest; while the young lady's relations considered her so shamefully ill-used, that they insisted upon and procured a separation; the conditions being-1st, that the Countess should reside with her father; 2nd, that her husband should provide her maintenance. She went then to reside with Count Gamba, at the distance of about fifteen miles from Ravenna, where Lord Byron visited her once or twice a-month, passing the rest of his time in perfect solitude.

Italy was now in the fiery and fretful state of her own volcanos; and for a time it was allowed to persons, even less imaginative than Lord Byron, to indulge the fond belief that the great spirit of other times

was not utterly quenched in the hearts on her sons. Into the plans, however, more perhaps than into the hopes, of this time, from the poesy, the daring every thing connected with the cause of Italian liberty, Byron rushed with enthusiasm. His palace was a place of council and a place of concealment to the conspirators of Romagna; and to the Neapolitan government he wrote the following address, which was intercepted :-

"An Englishman, a friend to liberty, having understood that the Neapolitans permit even foreigners to contribute to the good cause, is desirous that they should do him the honour of accepting a thousand louis, which he takes the liberty of offering. Having already, not long since, been an ocular witness of the despotism of the Barbarians in the States occupied by them in Italy, he sees, with the enthusiasm natural to a cultivated man, the generous determination of the Neapolitans to assert their well-won independence. As a member of the English House of Peers, he would be a traitor to the principles which placed the reigning family of England on the throne, if he were not grateful for the noble lesson so lately given both to people and to kings. The offer which he desires to make is small in itself, as must always be that presented from an individual to a nation; but he trusts that it will not be the last they will receive from his countrymen. His distance from the frontier, and the feeling of his personal incapacity to contribute efficaciously to the service of the nation, prevents him from proposing himself as worthy of the lowest commission, for which experience and talent might be requisite. But if, as a mere volunteer, his presence were not a burden to whomsoever he might serve under, he would repair to whatever place the Neapolitan government might point out, there to obey the orders and participate in the dangers of his commanding officer, without any other motive than that of sharing the destiny of a brave nation, defending itself against the self-called Holy Alliance, which but combines the vice of hypocrisy with despotism."

I pause upon this address for one moment, for I confess that I cannot help being overpowered by my, ¦ not I trust unnatural, feelings of indignation, when I think of the infamy, for infamy it was, with which the world-the mean, base, and cowardly part of the world-had contrived to encompass, as it were in a toil, the name and fame of a man who, stigmatized as the hater of mankind, never displayed a sympathy which was not hostile to the misrulers of mankind— who, at the very moment of which I am speaking, suffering under popular malignity, did not for that abjure and hate the people; and, an exile from his native land, remembered its history and its laws, in taking the side of freedom.

True and melancholy was it that he wrote his own destiny, when he said-"The scoundrels who have all along persecuted me will triumph, and when justice

is done to me it will be when this haud is as cold as the hearts that have stung me." Even then, however, justice was done to him in Italy; and the best and bravest spirits of that unhappy land, if they did not sympathize with the wrongs, acknowledged the virtues and the energies, of the illustrious sojourner amongst them. "But the Neapolitans betrayed themselves and all the world; and those who would have given their blood for Italy could only give her their tears."

The exile of such in the Papal states as had only been watching an opportunity for rising, like that of the hoped-for success of the Neapolitan patriots would have offered, followed as a matter of course, and among these were the Counts Gamba, father and son. The Countess Guiccioli was obliged to accompany her father. The poor of Ravenna, fearing a similar sentence for Lord Byron, at whom indeed the sentence of the Gambas was indirectly levelled, petitioned the Cardinal to procure permission for him to remain: and this was the man whom half the griping parsons of Ireland and England-disputing with an unhappy peasant for his last potatoe called, forsooth! devil, fiend, or any other of those gentle names taught in their peculiar vocabulary of Christian charity.

From Ravenna, about October, 1821, Lord Byron departed, with many mournful presentiments, for Pisa, at which place the Countess and her family were then awaiting him; and in this town he received the intelligence of the death of a natural daughter, born of an English lady, who then resided at Florence. The little girl (named Allegra) died at the convent of Bagna Cavallo, where Lord Byron had placed her for education. For this child he had a strong affection, and at her death he appears to have been deeply affected. The body he sent embalmed to England, with instructions that it should be buried in Harrow church-yard, as near as possible to that spot which was often witness to his schoolboy reveries.

There seems to have been a kind of homeless desolation about him at this period, which, conspiring with his love for strange lands, wandering, and adventure, made him turn his thoughts to South America, on which subject he actually wrote, requesting advice, to Mr. Ellice, late Secretary at War.

This was the summer of the death of Mr. Shelley, of whom, since his residence at Geneva, Lord Byron had seen a great deal. He was drowned, with a Mr. Williams, ir returning from Leghorn to Lerici. The bodies were found and burnt; the spot chosen for the ceremony being thus described :

"Before us," says Mr. Trelawny, "was the sea, with islands; behind us the Apennines; beside us a large tract of thick wood, stunted and twisted into fantastic shapes by the sea-breeze." *****“The weather." continues Mr. Hunt, "was beautifully fine. The Mediterranean, now soft and lucid, kissed the shores as if to make peace with it; the yellow sand

and blue sky intensely contrasted with one another: marble mountains touched the air with coolness, and the flame of the fire bore away towards heaven in vigorous amplitude, waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable beauty."

The death of Mr. Shelley left Lord Byron alone with Mr. Hunt in the Liberal, a publication which he had commenced in common with his deceased! friend and that gentleman, having long had the idea of such a scheme, and indeed written to Mr. Moore upon the subject. The Liberal, though it contained Heaven and Earth, and the Vision of Judgment, two of Lord Byron's most remarkable compositions, was unsuccessful, and neither Mr. Hunt nor himself seem to have been much satisfied with their literary companionship. The causes for dissatisfaction on both sides have been given to the public. Mr. Moore calls it "an unworthy alliance," which, in respect to the talents and the principles of the author of Rimini, it was not. Mr. Hunt says, it was an insincere and interested one, with apparently as little reason. At all events, to Lord Byron it was unpopular, and there is no doubt that he wished to get quit of it handsomely, though he resisted with spirit several attempts that were made to induce him to give up Mr. Hunt, immediately after Shelley's demise.

It might, perhaps, be in some degree to break off this connection, and to efface the recollection of it, that he turned his thoughts to Greece. But there were also many other causes tempting him to the noble and chivalrous enterprise with which his name is now entwined. The natural bent of his disposition, manifested as a boy, was for scenes of action and contention; and few persons, indeed, have ever contrived to mix, with what would be called a peaceful life, so much of struggling and adventure. But, from the time of his first publication to the day of his death, there seems to have been an impression upon his mind, that this, the active part of his genius, had not, in a literary career, sufficient scope for display. At a moment when troubles were expected in England, he talks of taking an active part in the fray. In his correspondence with Mr. Moore in Italy, he says:-"It may seem odd to you, but I do not think literature my vocation;" and so, when a rising was expected in that country, he was more fully prepared to fight against German domination than perhaps any one over whom it extended.

Greece, reviving his early recollections, and at the same time offering all that glory could hope for, in its then inspiring contest-Greece, at that period, and the battles of Greece-had every thing to captivate and influence a poetic mind; while the memorable and oft-repeated assurance, that

"Freedom's battle, once begun,

And thus bequeath'd from sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won,"

called on the Bard to assist in the achievement of his own prophecy. Other thoughts might there also be, more nearly affecting home and his return to that native land, with which he was connected by blood and inseparably linked by fame.

The cause of Greece, popular in England, had been adopted with warmth by many public men. The champion of that cause, Lord Byron came before his countrymen in a new and noble character, and might find it no difficult matter-if successful, from admiration,-if unfortunate, from sympathy-to unite around him those popular affections which, in his dark and meteoric career, had been estranged. With all that could excite him to the undertaking, he himself, however, seems to have entered upon it with much foreboding of disaster; and in the last evening that he spent with Lady Blessington, at Genoa, suffered himself to be overpowered by dark and melancholy emotions. "Here," said he, "we are now all together; but when and where shall we meet again? I have a sort of boding that we see each other for the last time; as something tells me I shall never again return from Greece."

It was in the beginning of April, 1823, that the noble subject of this memoir received a visit from Mr. Blaquiere, then on his road to the Morea. Almost immediately afterwards, he entered into correspondence with the Greek committee, and, in the latter end of July, left Italy to see it no more. Madame Guiccioli remained there. Her brother, Count Gamba, accompanied Lord Byron. His course was first bent to one of the Ionian Islands, whence it was thought he might be able to learn the exact position of affairs before he landed upon the continent. In Cephalonia he staid a considerable time, where he seems to have been principally occupied with the attempt to unravel the intricate politics of the scene he was about to enter upon, and in listening to the orthodox doctrines of a Mr. Kennedy, a very excellent and pious, but rather illjudging, gentleman, who undertook, very confidently, to convert Lord B. to a full belief in every one of the Thirty-nine Articles, if he would but listen to him twelve hours at a time. Unfortunately, this condition was indispensable. Lord Byron sank, I think, beneath the second hour, otherwise (Dr. Kennedy always said) he would have been converted.

It was the end of December when Byron reached the coast of the Morea, and putting off again on the 5th of January, after some danger from adverse winds, arrived, in spite of the Turkish fleet blockading its port, at Missolonghi, where he landed amidst the exulting population of the place, who, amidst the mingled din of rejoicing shouts, wild music, and artillery, conducted him to the house prepared for him.

A few dull fools have always been ready to spread the doctrine that there exists some incompatibility between a poetical mind and a practical capacity. Unfortunately for them, history, which has preserved

to us the names of Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon, furnishes hardly one solitary example of their theory; nor have they a spiteful consolation in the brief and chivalrous career which our noble Poet entered upon. Landed in Greece, once embarked in her cause, it was impossible for any one to have displayed a sounder judgment, a cooler courage, or a more daring spirit, during circumstances which might have fairly excused a want in either: beset by difficulties of every description,amidst savage Suliotes, rushing at every moment into his room under the wild impulses of warlike insubordination and legislative quacks, spouting forth their well-intentioned nonsense about a free press and a Benthamite republic,-accused here as a miser, because he reserved his means for objects of utilityattacked there as an oligarch and an aristocrat, because he contended that a government must be strong at home which had to fight against a foreign foe, -disappointed in all his darling schemes of distinguishing himself, by the folly or incapacity of those whom he had come to serve,-poked up in a pestilential city, decimated by fever and disturbed by dissensions, he neither allowed himself to be irritated, nor disgusted, nor down-hearted. The only one who showed the least capacity for commanding, he was the only one of Greeks, Germans, or English, who showed the least inclination to obey. While Colonel Stanhope and Mr. Trelawny were leaguing with the Greek chief Ulysses, the Greeks, even in the Greek town in which he was, fighting amongst themselves, his guard actually refusing to march, and his artillery deserting he himself says:-"As for me, I am willing to do what I am bidden, and to follow my instructions. I neither seek nor shun any thing that I may be wished to attempt. As for personal safety, besides that it ought not to be a consideration, take it that a man is, on the whole, as safe in one place as another, and after all he had better end with a bullet than bark in his body. If we are not taken off with the sword, we are like to march off with an ague in this mud-basket; and to conclude with a very bad pun, to the ear rather than the eye, better martially than marsh-ally. The situation of Missolonghi is not unknown to you. The dykes of Holland, when broken down, are the deserts of Arabia for dryness in comparison."

In such a spot and under such circumstances was Lord Byron placed; not, let me say, by a ridiculous enthusiasm, for from first to last he fully understood the difficulties of his situation; but by an honourable desire for enterprise, a carelessness for death in a good cause, a desire, perchance, to be restored to the good esteem of his fellow-countrymen, and an ardent aspiration for the freedom of a celebrated country and a gallant people, long placed under a degrading and intolerable yoke.

His first endeavours were to mitigate the savage and atrocious character of the existing contest; and