The Prophecy of Dante, begun during his first stay at Ravenna, was sent home on March 14, 1820. It was dedicated to the Countess Guiccioli, at whose suggestion it had been begun. But Murray delayed to publish, despite protests from the author. "You are losing (like a goose) the best time for publishing Dante and the Tragedy ". The tragedy was Marino Faliero. Both were at last issued in a single volume on April 21, 1821.1 The poem is in the terza rima of Dante. The personal note, as usual, sounds in the finest passages. These are the description of the exile's doom, with their allusion to "that fatal She. . . . the cold partner who had brought Destruction for a dowry"; the closing lines of the third canto; and again in the last canto, where contemplation of the outlaw sounds, as remorse had done in earlier days, the now recurrent note of his serious work.

He occupied himself, in these early days of domestication, with a mechanical task-the translation" into cramp English of the first canto of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore. This had been begun at Venice, and now served as the desired something craggy for his mind to break on. Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment owe their existence to Pulci; and so intense was Byron's gratitude that he actually brought himself to regard the translation as his masterpiece. But he never succeeded in getting Murray to publish it; and after it had been more than two years in "my Admiral's " hands, Byron transferred it to Leigh Hunt's brother and it appeared in the fourth and last number of The Liberal. The translation adds nothing to Byron's reputation or our delight. One moment of amusement it does afford-when he rhymes laurels with Charles.

It was now that Byron wrote the Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine-ostensibly a letter addressed to J. D. Israeli, Esq.; but in reality a personal manifesto. "I am framing an answer (in prose) to the Blackwood article of last August; it will set the kiln in a low. . . .I must now put myself in a passion to continue [it]". By his own orders on mature consideration, and also partly because of Murray's delays, this was not published during his lifetime. The passage beginning "The man who is exiled by a faction" is magnificent; not even in ago", wrote Byron to Murray, that the new cantos were not good. You may suppress them, if you like, but I can alter nothing". 1 Murray paid £1000 for the tragedy and the poem.

"

"The man who is exiled by a faction has the consolation of thinking that he is a martyr; he is upheld by hope and the dignity of his cause, real or imaginary; he who withdraws from the pressure of debt may indulge in the thought that time and prudence will retrieve his circumstances; he who is condemned by the law has a term to his banishment, or a dream of its abbreviation; or, it may be, the knowledge or the belief of some injustice of the law, or of its administration in his own particular; but he who is

his finest verse does the rage and resistance and redress flame forth into more consuming heat. That is the true climax. The letter then degenerates into personal attacks on Wordsworth and the Lakers, and ends in the tedious vindication of " the great little Queen Anne's man ", which was the King Charles's head of his critical writings.

Allegra was with him at Ravenna, and there came in the beginning of May an impassioned appeal from Claire to be allowed to see her. An application had first been made through the Hoppners, answered by Byron in a letter which Claire characterised in her Journal as "concerning green fruit and God ”.1

outlawed by general opinion, without the intervention of hostile politics, illegal judgment, or embarrassed circumstances, whether he be innocent or guilty, must undergo all the bitterness of exile, without hope, without pride, without alleviation. This case was mine. Upon what grounds the public founded their opinion, I am not aware; but it was general, and it was decisive. Of me or of mine they knew little, except that I had written what is called poetry, was a nobleman, had married, become a father, and was involved in differences with my wife and her relatives, no one knew why, because the persons complaining refused to state their grievances. The fashionable world was divided into parties, mine consisting of a very small minority; the reasonable world was naturally on the stronger side, which happened to be the lady's, as was most proper and polite. . . . I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private rancour ; my name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew ; but this was not enough. In other countries, in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depths of the lakes, I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same : so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes him to the waters. . . . I have heard of, and believe, that there are human beings so constituted as to be insensible to injuries; but I believe that the best mode to avoid taking vengeance is to get out of the way of temptation. . . . I do not in this allude to the party, who might be right or wrong; but to many who made her cause the pretext of their own bitterness. She, indeed, must long have avenged me in her own feelings, for whatever her reasons may have been (and she never adduced them, to me at least), she probably neither contemplated nor conceived to what she became the means of conducting the father of her child, and the husband of her choice ".

The article in Blackwood was on the first and second cantos of Don Juan. 1 Byron had said: "I so totally disapprove of the mode of children's treatment in [the Shelley] family that I should look upon the child as going into a hospital . . . I shall either send her to England, or put her in a convent for education. But [she] shall not quit me again to perish of starvation and green fruit, or be taught to believe there is no Deity. Whenever there is convenience of vicinity and access, her mother can always have her with her; otherwise no. It was so stipulated from the beginning".

It contained the first hint of sending the child to a convent, and this terribly alarmed Claire. "You will inflict the greatest of all evils on my child . . . she will be equally divided from us both "--and she recalled the Bible story of Solomon's judgment. Byron answered not to her but to Shelley, who wrote condemning his harsh tone, though admitting that Claire's letters might too probably be vexatious. We know no more until August 25, when Byron again wrote, declining all correspondence with Claire. Shelley answered on September 17, saying now that any of her letters which he had seen he had thought extremely childish and absurd. "I wonder, however ", he added, "at your being provoked at what Claire writes. . . . The weak and the foolish are in this respect like kings-they can do no wrong". There the matter ends for that year. Byron sent Hoppner a report of the child: "obstinate as a mule . . . she thinks herself handsome, and will do as she pleases". In truth, Allegra was (as Hoppner told Moore) by no means a lovable child, despite her great beauty.

In the spring of 1820 there was a little breeze with Hobhouse, who had, as Byron said, foamed into a reformer and subsided. into Newgate.1 This incited Byron to a very dull squib, which Murray showed to Hobhouse and many others. The victim was keenly hurt, and his anger lasted-but it was nobly shown; 2 and the saddened entries in his Journal are convincing evidence that his deep affection was more wounded than his vanity. But Byron was annoyed by the feeling which his prank had stirred; and later, finding that the strain still lasted, made through Murray what may almost be called an attack upon the friend of so many years.

The truth is that he was so profoundly dissatisfied with his way of life at this time that all the natural sweetness of his temper was soured-for though vehement and irritable sometimes, he was normally sweet-tempered, with men at any rate. Such feeling as he had ever had for Teresa Guiccioli had faded, and left him in a temper towards her-first of apathy, and then of such impatience as could not easily be endured. Already in May 1820, Moore could make this entry in his diary: "Davy [Sir Humphrey] went to Ravenna to see Lord Byron, who is now living domesticated with the Guiccioli and her husband after all. He was rather anxious to get off with Davy to

1 In 1819, Hobhouse had published a pamphlet which was voted a breach of privilege; he was committed to Newgate, and remained there until the dissolution of Parliament in February 1820. At the ensuing election, he was chosen as one of the representatives for Westminster.

• He wrote Murray an admirable letter (L. and J. App. xi.).

Bologna, professedly for the purpose of seeing Lady Davy, but I have no doubt with a wish to give his Contessa the slip In Byron's diary for January 23, 1821, he sums up the past year.

"The year 1820 was not a fortunate one for the individual me. . . . I lost a lawsuit, after two decisions in my favour. The project of lending money on an Irish mortgage was finally rejected by my wife's trustee after a year's hope and trouble. The Rochdale lawsuit had endured fifteen years, and always prospered till I married; since which, everything has gone wrong -with me, at least. In the same year, 1820, the Countess T. G., in spite of all I said and did to prevent it, would separate from her husband. . . . The other little petty vexations of the yearoverturns in carriages-the murder of people before one's door, and dying in one's beds-the cramp in swimming-colics-indigestions and bilious attacks, etc. etc. etc.

"Many small articles make up a sum,

And hey-ho for Caleb Quotem, oh!

"

The stirring of the revolutionary movement of 1820-21 in Italy brought in its train the Carbonari troubles—and, incidentally, the separation of Teresa from her husband. Byron wrote to Murray in April: "There is THAT brewing in Italy which will speedily cut off all liberty of communication, and set all your Anglo-travellers flying in all directions. . . . The Spanish and French affairs have set the Italians in a ferment, and no wonder : they have been too long trampled on ". He was of course on the side of the insurgents against Austria, and Teresa's father and brother were of the same persuasion. But the Count Guiccioli was not-and Byron happened to be lodging under his roof. The Palace soon became the head-quarters of insurrection, for Byron was at the head of the "American" division of the Carbonari in Romagna. "The police", he wrote in April 1821, " is all on the alert, and the Cardinal glares pale through all his purple". While these matters were still in embryo, the Count Guiccioli made a move. He requested his wife to dismiss her admirer. She refused. He replied by threatening her with a decree of separation. She laughed in his face, and her family and the public (as Byron wrote) were on her side. "I have given her ", wrote Byron to Moore at the end of May, "the best advice, viz.:

1 Over the Rochdale coal-mines.

2 After the fall of Decazes and the assassination of the Duc de Berri in 1820, the Government of France became reactionary. There were sporadic insurrections, which were suppressed. In Spain the movement was more successful, and Ferdinand III was forced to take the oath of fidelity to the free Constitution.

to stay with him, pointing out the state of a separated woman. and making the most exquisite moral reflections-but to no purpose. She says, "I will stay with him, if he will let you remain with me. It is hard that I should be the only woman in Romagna who is not to have her Amico'. . . . You know how females reason on such occasions. He says he has let it go on till he can do so no longer. But he wants her to stay, and dismiss me; for he doesn't like to pay back her dowry and to make an alimony. Her relations are rather for the separation, as they detest him, indeed, so does everybody.... I should have retreated, but honour, and an erysipelas which has attacked her, prevent me, to say nothing of love, for I love her most entirely, though not enough to persuade her to sacrifice everything to a frenzy ".

On June 1, a further report to Moore:

'The separation business still continues, and all the world are implicated, including priests and cardinals. . . He has been trying at evidence, but can get none sufficient; for what would make fifty divorces in England won't do here-there must be the most decided proofs.

"All her relations are furious against him. The father has challenged him—a superfluous valour, for he don't fight, though suspected of two assassinations-one of the famous Monzoni of Forli. Warning was given me not to take such long rides in the Pine Forest without being on my guard; so I take my stiletto and a pair of pistols in my pocket during my daily rides.

"I won't stir from this place till the matter is settled one way or the other. She is as femininely firm as possible; and the opinion is so much against him, that the advocates decline to undertake his cause, because they say that he is either a fool or a rogue-fool, if he did not discover the liaison till now; and rogue, if he did know it, and waited for some bad end, to divulge it. In short, there has been nothing like it since the days of Guido di Polenta's family, in these parts.

"If the man has me taken off, like Polonius' say he made a good end',--for a melodrame. The principal security is, that he has not the courage to spend twenty scudi-the average price of a clean-handed bravo-otherwise there is no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with one servant, and sometimes an acquaintance, who latterly looks a little queer in solitary bits of bushes".

The final news was sent to the same correspondent on July 13. "The Pope has pronounced their separation. The decree came yesterday from Babylon,-it was she and her friends who demanded it, on the grounds of her husband's (the noble Count Cavalier's) extraordinary usage. He opposed it with all his might