Σχίν

regular, and rather aquiline; mouth small, skin clear and soft, with a kind of hectic colour, forehead remarkably good; her hair is of the dark gloss, curl and colour of Lady J's; her figure is light and pretty; she is a famous songstress-scientifically so; her natural voice (in conversation I mean) is very sweet, and the naïveté of the Venetian dialect is always pleasing in the mouth of a woman."

With this lady, who, if beautiful, does not seem, from what I have heard, to have been of that description of beauty which is beyond all price, Lord Byron formed a kind of half sentimental attachment, strong enough to take him hastily back from Rome, which he had visited in the spring of 1817, though not before he had drawn from the eternal city an inspiration which has given it a new lease of immortality. On his return he composed the fourth canto of Childe Harold, the most faultless in its magnificence of any of his poems. And now, once more at Venice, he seems to have had that feverish thirst for pleasure which betokens any thing but a healthy enjoyment of it. "I will work the mine of my youth," he says, amidst the restless revels of a Venetian carnival, "till the last veins of the ore." Removing from the house of Marianna's husband, he took a palace on the grand canal, and as Mr. Moore says, with a hypocritical little shudder, ❝ commenced a kind of life destructive to his physical energies, and degrading to those of the mind."

For

the life Lord Byron thought proper to adopt, there is little excuse, but it is certainly rather amusing to see the patrician morality of his courtly biographer, who adds that, "it was unluckily among the beauties of the lower orders (the ladies of the higher orders being 'uglies' by the by), that Byron selected the companions of his disengaged hours."

It is but a fair justification of his tastes in this particular, to quote the description the Poet has given of the dark-eyed sultana of his low-lived haram :— "Since you desire the story of Margarita Cogni, you shall be told it, though it may be lengthy.

"Her face is the fine Venetian cast of the old time; her figure, though perhaps too tall, is not less fineand taken altogether in the national dress.

"In the summer of 1817, **** and myself were sauntering on horseback along the Brenta one evening, when, amongst a group of peasants, we remarked two girls as the prettiest we had seen for some time. About this period, there had been great distress in the country, and I had a little relieved some of the people. Generosity makes a great figure at very little cost in Venetian livres, and mine had probably been exaggerated as an Englishman's. Whether they remarked us looking at them or no, I know not; but one of them called out to me in Venetian, 'Why do not you, who relieve others, think of us also?" I turned round and answered her-'Cara, tu sei troppo bella e giovane per aver' bisogna del' soccorso mio.'

in short, in a few evenings we arranged our affairs; and for a long space of time she was the only one who preserved over me an ascendancy, which was often disputed, and never impaired.

"The reasons of this were, firstly, her personvery dark, tall, the Venetian face, very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old, She was besides a thorough Venetian in her dialect, in her thoughts, in her countenance, in every thing, with all their naïveté and pantaloon humour. Besides, she could neither read nor write, and could not plague me with letters, except twice that she paid sixpence to a public scribe, under the piazza, to make a letter for her, upon some occasion when I was ill, and could not see her. In other respects, she was somewhat fierce and 'prepotente,' that is, overbearing, and used to walk in whenever it suited her, with no very great regard to time, place, nor persons; and if she found any women in her way, she knocked them down.

"When I first knew her, I was in 'relazione' (liaison) with la Signora **, who was silly enough one evening at Dolo, accompanied by some of her female friends, to threaten her; for the gossips of the villeggiatura had already found out, by the neighing of my horse one evening, that I used to 'ride late in the night' to meet the Fornarina. Margarita threw back her veil (fazziolo), and replied in very explicit Venetian : 'You are not his wife: I am not his wife: you are his donna, and I am his donna: your husband is a becco, and mine is another. For the rest, what right have you to reproach me? if he prefers me to you, is it my fault? If you wish to secure him, tie him to your petticoat-string. But do not think to speak to me without a reply, because you happen to be richer than I am.' Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence, she went on her way, leaving a numerous audience, with Madame **, to ponder at her leisure on the dialogue between them.

"When I came to Venice for the winter, she followed; and, as she found herself out to be a favourite, she came to me pretty often. But she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women. At the 'Cavalchina,' the masked ball on the last night of the Carnival, where all the world goes, she snatched off the mask of Madame Contarini, a lady noble by birth, and decent in conduct, for no other reason but because

she 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; 1 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 beautifal; 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.

a

"Then she would have her gowns with a tail-like 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

ther she meant to use this against herself or me, I know not-probably against neither-but Fletcher disarmed her. I then called my boatmen, and desired them to get the gondola ready, and conduct her to her own house again, seeing carefully that she did herself no mischief by the way. She seemed quite quiet, and walked down stairs. I resumed my dinner.

"We heard a great noise, and went out and met them on the stair-case, carrying her up. She had thrown herself into the canal. That she intended to destroy herself, I do not believe: but when we consider the fear women and men who can't swim have of deep or even of shallow water (and the Venetians in particular, though they live on the waves), and that it was also night, and very cold, it shows that she had a devilish spirit of some sort within her. They had got her out without much damage, excepting the salt water she had swallowed, and the wetting she had undergone.

"I foresaw her intention to refix herself, and sent for a surgeon, inquiring how many hours it would require to restore her from her agitation; and he named the time. I then said, 'I give you that time, and more if you require it; but at the expiration of this prescribed period, if she does not leave the house, I will.'

"All my people were consternated. They had always been frightened at her, and were now paralysed: they wanted me to apply to the police, to guard myself, etc. etc. like a pack of snivelling servile boobies as they were. I did nothing of the kind, thinking that I might as well end that way as another; besides, I had been used to savage women, and knew their ways. "I had her sent home quietly after her recovery, and never saw her since, except twice at the opera, at a distance amongst the audience. She made many attempts to return, but no more violent ones.-And this is the story of Margarita Cogni."

Who would not admire the fierce energies and noble beauty of this passionate peasant? But the magnificent Margarita was only one of many who had no more virtue and less magnanimity than herself. It was amidst the license of so wild life that the first pages of Don Juan were composed.

until that moment, she had never had an idea-from the instantaneous impression which Lord Byron made upon Countess Guiccioli, it is easy to conjecture, the impression being mutual, that it was not long before mutual and not unpleasing confessions were made; and indeed these were made so quickly, that, by the middle of the month in which their acquaintance had begun (April, 1819), their liaison was at that point which, of some liaisons, is the end. At this period the lady was obliged to leave Venice for Ravenna with her husband, and to Ravenna, after some hesitation, Lord Byron followed her.

In August, the Guicciolis left Ravenna for Bologna, and to Bologna Lord Byron removed also. Here the Count left his wife a month afterwards, and on her health, which had been for some time affected, requiring the change, he with the most complaisant readiness permitted her to proceed to Venice with Lord Byron, and, on arriving there, the physicians of the Countess prescribing the open air of the country, she wentstill with the consent of her husband-to reside at a villa hired by his Lordship, who "gave up his villa to her, coming to reside there also." I here quote from Madame Guiccioli herself, who has certainly found an expression most peculiarly delicate for her acceptance of such a residence.

The only person, however, having a right to dispute the propriety of the proceeding, viz., the ancient Count himself, showed, at first, no disposition to do so, merely begging Lord Byron to lend him, the Count Guiccioli, 1,000l. at due and legal interest, the Count having only 30,000l. a-year; nor was it until this little accommodation was refused, that his honour became somewhat irritable and uneasy. For the moment, however, disputes were terminated by the Countess returning with her husband to Ravenna. It was not however in the solitudes of this old romantic town, haunted by the memories of the preceding summer, that the young Countess was likely to forget her illustrious admirer. She suffered, and suffered so severely, that the state of her heart affected her health; and at last, at the request of the lady's own relations, and the sanction of the lady's own husband, who had, unknown to the Countess, exacted from Byron a promise that he would not again visit them, the noble Poet, who had determined to depart for England, changed his mind and set out for Ravenna. feelings he thus describes :

His

"I could not summon up resolution enough to leave the country where you are without once more seeing you. On yourself it will depend whether I ever again shall leave you. Of the rest we shall speak when we You ought by this time to know which is most to your welfare-my presence or my absence. For myself, I am a citizen of the world, all countries are alike You have ever been, since our first acquaint

meet.

to me.

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 a 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 ¦ busband 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 procured a separation; the conditions being-1st, Įthat 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.

and

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

was not utterly quenched in the hearts of 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 mankindwho, 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 hand 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, in 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 bis 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,"