about Florence, though I must see it for the sake of the Venus, etc. etc.". But already he was more in the mood for works of art. Immediately before his departure from Venice he visited the Manfrini Palace, and wrote of the Titian Ariosto: "It is the poetry of portrait, and the portrait of poetry. There was also one of some learned lady. . . . I never saw greater beauty, or sweetness, or wisdom; it is the kind of face to go mad for, because it can't walk out of its frame ". Giorgione's portrait of his wife inspired a stanza in Beppo later on.1 Nevertheless, he still stoutly maintained his attitude towards painting. "Depend upon it, of all the arts, it is the most artificial and unnatural. . . . I never yet saw the picture or the statue— which came within a league of my conception or experience; but I have seen many mountains and seas and rivers and views, and two or three women who went as far beyond it-besides some horses, and a lion in the Morea, and a tiger at supper at Exeter 'Change "."

In the middle of April he left Venice, and on the 26th wrote to Murray from Foligno. He had spent but a day at Florence, and had there written the Lament of Tasso; he despatched it to England on April 23. The Florentine Galleries completed the conquest half-begun at Venice. He had "returned from them drunk with beauty. The Venus [de' Medici] is more for admiraion than love". But the stanzas of Childe Harold are more like love than admiration.

"We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with Beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness.

The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream

That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam ".

At Rome, reached on April 29, he rejoined Hobhouse, with whom he had parted company in December. "As a whole, ancient and modern, it beats. everything at least that I have ever seen. But I can't describe, because my first impressions are always strong and confused, and my memory selects and

1 The Manfrini collection was partly dispersed in 1856; but some of the pictures are in the Accademia delle Belle Arti. Titian's Ariosto is now the property of the Earl of Rosebery. According to Vasari, Giorgione was not married.

2 In his Journal of 1813-14 there occurs, on November 14, 1813, the following: Two nights ago, I saw the tigers sup at Exeter 'Change. Such a conversazione! There was a hippopotamus, like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the Ursine Sloth had the very voice and manner of my valet -but the tiger talked too much. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor antelopes were dead. I should hate to see one here; the sight of the camel made me pine again for Asia Minor ".

FOR SCOTLAND

reduces them to order. ... There must be a sense or two more than we have as mortals". He studied it on horseback, "as I did Constantinople. But Rome is the elder sister and the finer". The day before he left he saw three robbers guillotined, and wrote Murray a minute and gruesome description. "The first ", he added, turned me quite hot and thirsty, and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera-glasses (I was close, but determined to see as we should see everything, once, with attention); the second and third . . . I am ashamed to say, had no effect on me as a horror, though I would have saved them if I could ". While in Rome he permitted Hobhouse to write to Thorwaldsen, asking whether and when Byron could sit to him for a bust. Thorwaldsen, who was a very indolent letter-writer, probably delayed to answer, and Byron went to him without ceremony. "He placed himself opposite me (so Thorwaldsen told Andersen), "but at once began to put on a quite different expression from that usual to him. 'Will you not sit still?' I said to him; '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, it was universally admitted to be an excellent likeness. Byron, when he saw it, said 'It is not at all like me; my expression is more unhappy'. He intensely desired to be so exceedingly miserable', added Thorwaldsen with a humorous expression ".1

Byron had meant to stay in Rome till June; but his eagerness to return to Marianna was so great that he left on May 26, and by his request she travelled half-way to meet him. He was back in Venice on the 28th, and soon went to the villa La Mira, on the Brenta, about seven miles inland and close to the city. "I have determined on another year", he wrote to Murray on June 4, "and many years of residence if I can compass them. Marianna is with me". Hobhouse joined him early in July; Monk Lewis arrived in Venice about the same time, and stayed until the middle of August. His visit is memorable for the La Mira Separation Document. Lewis, during his stay, reported one of Brougham's indiscretions; and Hobhouse, writing to Augusta in 1818, told her how he had found Byron and the Monk together, and a paper 2 just written and sealed. Augusta

1 This account is taken from Karl Elze's Life of Lord Byron (English translation, 1872, p. 221); and there is a note to the page, pointing out that Thorwaldsen's impression agrees with that of the American painter William Edward West, who later painted Byron at Leghorn. 'He assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as if he were thinking of a frontispiece for Childe Harold ". The bust, which was done for Hobhouse, is now in the possession of the Right Hon. Henry Hobhouse. The head of Thorwaldsen's statue in Trinity College, Cambridge, is a repetition of this bust (L. and J. iv. 130). Astarte, p. 349. (App. I and J.)

wrote to Lady Byron, reporting this, and how Byron "called upon Hobhouse to prove that he had done everything to induce you to come into court!" (The italics and exclamation are in the original letter from Augusta, and go far to prove that this statement was regarded by her, and would be regarded by her correspondent, as surprising and ludicrous.) "Hobhouse", she continues, "tried Heaven and Earth to persuade him not to give it to Monk Lewis. . . in vain .. and only the hour after it was gone, B. expressed regret he had written and given it ".1 The document was found among Lewis's papers after his death in 1818, and was first published in The Academy for October 9, 1869. The gist of it is that Byron had called repeatedly and in vain for a statement of the charges against him. He added a postscript to say that he was utterly ignorant of the allegations, charges, or whatever name they had assumed. It may again be noted that he speaks all through of charges. He knew the reason; the charges he could have extorted, as we have seen. This very paper "shows his consciousness that he ought to have done so, if his case had been producible"; and Lewis's suppression of it from even private circulation shows that he too recognised this. In A Vindication of Lady Byron, the writer says: "He boasts that he stood at bay in Venice: he should have stood at bay in London. .. No man of the world, conscious of a common offence only, and suffering under such imputations, would have allowed his adversaries to keep back any part of the charge ". But for Augusta's sake, as we now know, he could not take action.

3

...

He had written to Murray on January 2, 1817—the anniversary of his wedding-day, or funeral, as he called it-to say: "I have not done a stitch of poetry since I left Switzerland, and have not at present the estro upon me. [My poesy] is the dream of my sleeping passions; when they are awake, I cannot speak their language, only in their Somnambulism, and just now they are not dormant ". But the great success and the many praises from friends of the Third Harold and the Prisoner of Chillon soon awakened the desire to be forthcoming again. On the 28th he wrote to Moore: "I am glad you like [the new Childe Harold]. It is a fine indistinct piece of poetic desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad during the time of its composition between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguish

1 Astarte, P. 349.

Dict. Nat. Biog., article " Byron " (L. S.).

་ ་་ 'You talk of marriage '-ever since my own funeral, the word makes me giddy, and throws me into a cold sweat. Pray, don't repeat it " (Letter to Murray, April 2, 1817).