LETTER 330. TO MR. HOPPNER. "Bologna, June 6. 1819. "I am at length joined to Bologna, where I am settled like a sausage, and shall be broiled like one, if this weather continues. Will you thank Mengaldo on my part for the Ferrara acquaintance, which was a very agreeable one. I stayed two days at Ferrara, and was much pleased with the Count Mosti, and the little the shortness of the time permitted me to see of his family. I went to his conversazione, which is very far superior to any thing of the kind at Venice- the women almost all young. several pretty- and the men courteous and cleanly. The lady of the mansion, who is young, lately married, and with child, appeared very pretty by candlelight (I did not see her by day), pleasing in her manners, and very lady-like, or thorough-bred, as we call it in England, a kind of thing which reminds one of a racer, an antelope, or an Italian greyhound. She seems very fond of her husband, who is amiable and accomplished; he has been in England two or three times, and is young. The sister, a Countess somebody—I forget what-(they are both Maffei by birth, and Veronese of course) is a lady of more display; she sings and plays divinely; but I thought she was a d-d long time about it. Her like [The Honourable Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, now Baroness Keith. In 1817 she was married to Count Flahaut, and on the demise of her father, in 1823, she succeeded to the peerage.] "I found, too, such a pretty epitaph in the Certosa cemetery, or rather two : one was, the other, "Martini Luigi Implora pace;' "Lucrezia Picini Implora eterna quiete.' That was all; but it appears to me that these two and three words comprise and compress all that can be said on the subject, and then, in Italian, they are absolute music. They contain doubt, hope, and humility; nothing can be more pathetic than the implora' and the modesty of the request;-they have had enough of lifethey want nothing but rest-they implore it, and 'eterna quiete.' It is like a Greek inscription in some good old heathen ⚫ City of the Dead.' Pray, if I am shovelled into the Lido churchyard in your time, let me have the implora pace,' and nothing else, for my epitaph. I never met with any, ancient or modern, that pleased me a tenth part so much. "In about a day or two after you receive this letter, I will thank you to desire Edgecombe to prepare for my return. I shall go back to Venice before I village on the Brenta. I shall stay but a few days in Bologna. I am just going out to see sights, but shall not present my introductory letters for a day or two, till I have run over again the place and pictures; nor perhaps at all, if I find that I have books and sights enough to do without the inhabitants. After that I shall return to Venice, where you may expect me about the eleventh, or perhaps sooner. Pray make my thanks acceptable to Mengaldo: my respects to the Consuless, and to Mr. Scott. I hope my daughter is well. "Ever yours, and truly. 2 ["Oh! may my shade behold no sculptur'd urns, Hours of Idleness. See Works, p. 378.] "P. S.—I went over the Ariosto MS. &c. &c. again at Ferrara, with the castle, and cell, and house, &c. &c. "One of the Ferrarese asked me if I knew 'Lord Byron,' an acquaintance of his, now at Naples. I told him 'No!' which was true both ways; for I knew not the impostor, and in the other, no one knows himself. He stared when told that I was the real Simon Pure.' Another asked me if I had not translated 'Tasso.' You see what fame is! how accurate! how boundless! I don't know how others feel, but I am always the lighter and the better looked on when I have got rid of mine; it sits on me like armour on the Lord Mayor's champion; and I got rid of all the husk of literature, and the attendant babble, by answering, that I had not translated Tasso, but a namesake had; and by the blessing of Heaven, I looked so little like a poet, that every body believed me." LETTER 331. TO MR. MURRAY. "Bologna, June 7. 1819. "Tell Mr. Hobhouse that I wrote to him a few days ago from Ferrara. It will therefore be idle in him or you to wait for any further answers or returns of proofs from Venice, as I have directed that no English letters be sent after me. The publication can be proceeded in without, and I am already sick of your remarks, to which I think not the least attention ought to be paid. "Tell Mr. Hobhouse that, since I wrote to him, I had availed myself of my Ferrara letters, and found the society much younger and better there than at Venice. I am very much pleased with the little the shortness of my stay permitted me to see of the Gonfaloniere Count Mosti, and his family and friends in general. 66 I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the grave-digger in Hamlet. He has a collection of capuchins' skulls, labelled on the forehead, and taking down one of them, said, 'This was Brother Desiderio Berro, who died at forty-one of my best 1 Though Lord Byron, like most other persons, in writing to different friends, was sometimes led to repeat the same circumstances and thoughts, there is, from the ever ready fertility of his mind, much less of such repetition in his correspondence than in that, perhaps, of any other multifarious letter writer; and, in the instance before us, where the same facts and reflections are, for the second time, introduced, it is with such new touches, friends. I begged his head of his brethren after his decease, and they gave it me. I put it in lime, and then boiled it. Here it is, teeth and all, in excellent preservation. He was the merriest, cleverest fellow I ever knew. Wherever he went, he brought joy; and whenever any one was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make him cheerful again. He walked so actively, you might have taken him for a dancer - he jokedhe laughed-oh! he was such a Frate as I never saw before, nor ever shall again!' "He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons. In showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of twenty, with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess Bartorini, dead two centuries ago: he said that, on opening her grave, they had found her hair complete, and as yellow as gold.' Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna; for instance : "Martini Luigi Implora pace.' "Lucrezia Picini Implora eterna quiete.' Can any thing be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can be said or sought: the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was rest, and this they implore! There is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and deathlike prayer, that can arise from the grave-'implora pace."1 I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words, and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of pickling, and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall."2 I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my deathbed, could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to your soil. I would not even feed your worms, if I could help it. So, as Shakspeare says of Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, who died at both of thought and expression, as render them, even a second time, interesting; what is wanting in the novelty of the matter being made up by the new aspect given to it. ["If you should get a quietus, you may command me entirely. I'll get you a snug lying in the Abbey here; or pickle you, and send you over to Blunderbuss Hall." Rivals, act v. sc. 2.] Ær. 31. BOLOGNA. - RAVENNA. 399 Venice (see Richard II.), that he, after bring her there also; and was in the act of fighting 44 4 Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens, "Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr. Hobhouse's sheets of Juan. Don't wait for further answers from me, but address yours to Venice, as usual. I know nothing of my own movements; I may return there in a few days, or not for some time. All this depends on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well, as well as his son and Mrs. Hoppner. My daughter Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty; her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will make, in that case, a manageable young lady. "I have never heard any thing of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycena. But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see it.' What a long letter I have scribbled! Yours, &c. "P. S.-Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the graves at Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can imagine." While he was thus lingering irresolute at Bologna, the Countess Guiccioli had been attacked with an intermittent fever, the violence of which, combining with the absence of a confidential person to whom she had been in the habit of intrusting her letters, prevented her from communicating with him. At length, anxious to spare him the disappointment of finding her so ill on his arrival, she had begun a letter, requesting that he would remain at Bologna till the visit to which she looked forward should 'There were, in the former edition, both here and in a subsequent letter, some passages reflecting upon the late Sir Samuel Romilly, which, in my anxiety to lay open the workings of Lord Byron's mind upon a subject in which so much of his happiness and character were involved, I had been induced to retain, though aware of the erroneous impression under which they were written ; — the evident morbidness of the feeling that dictated the attack, and the high, stainless reputation of the person assailed, being sufficient, I thought, to neutralise any ill effects such reflections might otherwise have produced. As I find it, however, to be the opinion of all those whose opinions I most respect, that, even with these antidotes, such an attack upon such a man ought not to be left on record, I willingly expunge all trace of it from these pages. writing, when a friend came in to announce the arrival of an English lord in Ravenna. She could not doubt for an instant that it was her noble friend; and he had, in fact, notwithstanding his declaration to Mr. Hoppner that it was his intention to return to Venice immediately, wholly altered this resolution before the letter announcing it was despatched, the following words being written on the outside cover:-"I am just setting off for Ravenna, June 8. 1819.- I changed my mind this morning, and decided to go on." Guiccioli's own account of these events, The reader, however, shall have Madame which, fortunately for the interests of my narration, I am enabled to communicate. promised to come and see me at Ravenna. "On my departure from Venice, he had Dante's tomb, the classical pine wood 2, the relics of antiquity which are to be found in that place, afforded a sufficient pretext for me to invite him to come, and for him to accept my invitation. He came, in fact, in the month of June, arriving at Ravenna on the day of the festival of the Corpus Domini; while I, attacked by a consumptive complaint, which had its origin from the moment of my quitting Venice, appeared on the point of death. The arrival of a distinguished foreigner at Ravenna, a town so remote from the routes ordinarily followed by travellers, was an event which gave rise to a good deal of conversation. His motives for such a visit became the subject of discussion, and these he himself afterwards involuntarily divulged; for having made some inquiries with a view to paying me a visit, and being told that it was unlikely that he would ever see me again, as I was at the point of death, he replied, if such were the case, he hoped that he should die also ; which circumstance, being repeated, revealed the object of his journey. Count Guiccioli, having been acquainted with Lord Byron at Venice, went to visit him now, and in the 2" Tal qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie "Even as from branch to branch, Along the piny forests on the shore Of Chiassi, rolls the gathering melody, When Eolus hath from his cavern loos'd The dripping south." CARY.] Dante himself (says Mr. Cary, in one of the notes on his admirable translation of this poet) "perhaps wandered in this wood during his abode with Guido Novello da Polenta." hope that his presence might amuse, and be of some use to me in the state in which I then found myself, invited him to call upon me. He came the day following. It is impossible to describe the anxiety he showed, the delicate attentions that he paid me. For a long time he had perpetually medical books in his hands; and not trusting my physicians, he obtained permission from Count Guiccioli to send for a very clever physician, a friend of his, in whom he placed great confidence. The attentions of Professor Aglietti (for so this celebrated Italian was called), together with tranquillity, and the inexpressible happiness which I experienced in Lord Byron's society, had so good an effect on my health, that only two months afterwards I was able to accompany my husband in a tour he was obliged to make to visit his various estates." I "I wrote to you from Padua, and from Bologna, and since from Ravenna. I find my situation very agreeable, but want my horses very much, there being good riding in the environs. I can fix no time for my return to Venice - it may be soon or lateor not at all—it all depends on the Donna, whom I found very seriously in bed with a cough and spitting of blood, &c., all of which has subsided. I found all the people here firmly persuaded that she would never recover; they were mistaken, however. 66 My letters were useful as far as I employed them; and I like both the place and people, though I don't trouble the latter 1 "Partendo io da Venezia egli promise di venir a vedermi a Ravenna. La Tomba di Dante, il classico bosco di pini, gli avvanzi di antichità che a Ravenna si trovano davano a me ragioni plausibili per invitarlo a venire, ed a lui per accettare l'invito. Egli venne difatti nel mese Guigno, e giunse a Ravenna nel giorno della Solennità del Corpus Domini, mentre io attaccata da una malattia de consunzione ch' ebbe principio dalla mia partenza da Venezia ero vicina a morire. L'arrivo in Ravenna d'un forestiero distinto, in un paese così lontano dalle strade che ordinariamente tengono i viaggiatori era un avvenimento del quale molto si parlava, indagandosene i motivi, che involontariamente poi egli feci conoscere. Perchè avendo egli domandato di me per venire a vedermi ed essendogli risposto che non potrebbe vedermi più perchè ero vicina a morire'-egli rispose che in quel caso voleva morire egli pure; la qual cosa essendosi poi ripetata si conobbe cosi l'oggetto del suo viaggio. "Il Conte Guiccioli visitò Lord Byron, essendolo conosciuto in Venezia, e nella speranza che la di lui compagnia potesse distrarmi ed essermi di qualche giovamento nello stato in cui mi trovavo egli lo invitò di venire a visitarmi. Il giorno appresso egli venne. Non si potrebbero descrivere le cure, i pensieri delicati, quanto more than I can help. She manages very well-but if I come away with a stiletto in my gizzard some fine afternoon, I shall not be astonished. I can't make him out at all he visits me frequently, and takes me out (like Whittington, the Lord Mayor) in a coach and sir horses. The fact appears to be, that he is completely governed by her — for that matter, so am I. The people here don't know what to make of us, as he had the character of jealousy with all his wives - this is the third. He is the richest of the Ravennese, by their own account, but is not popular among them. Now do, pray, send off Augustine, and carriage and cattle, to Bologna, without fail or delay, or I shall lose my remaining shred of senses. Don't forget this. My coming, going, and every thing, depend upon HER entirely, just as Mrs. Hoppner (to whom I remit my reverences) said in the true spirit of female prophecy. "You are but a shabby fellow not to have written before. “And I am truly yours, &c.” egli fece per me. Per molto tempo egli non ebbe per le mani che dei Libri di Medicina; e poco confidandosi nel miei medici ottenne dal Conte Guiccioli il permeso di far venire un valente medico di lui amico nel quale egli aveva molta confidenza. Le cure del Professore Aglietti (cosi si chiama questo distinto Italiano) la tranquillità anzi la felicità inesprimibile che mi cagionava la presenza di Lord Byron migliorarono così rapidamente la mia salute che entro lo spazio di due mesi potei seguire mio marito in un giro che egli doveva fare per le sue terre." — MS. 2 That this task of "governing" him was one of more ease than, from the ordinary view of his character, might be concluded, I have more than once, în these pages, expressed my opinion, and shall here quote, in corroboration of it, the remark of his own servant (founded on an observation of more than twenty years), in speaking of his master's matrimonial fate :-"It is very odd, but I never yet knew a lady that could not manage my Lord, except my Lady." "More knowledge," says Johnson, "may be gained of a man's real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from the most formal and studied narrative." ET. 31. * * RAVENNA. four weeks, having left Venice a month ago; - I came to see my Amica,' the Countess Guiccioli, who has been, and still continues, very unwell. She is only in her seventeenth, but not of a strong constitution. She has a perpetual cough and an intermittent fever, but bears up most gallantly in every sense of the word. Her husband (this is his third wife) is the richest noble of Ravenna, and almost of Romagna; he is also not the youngest, being upwards of threescore, but in good preservation. All this will appear strange to you, who do not understand the meridian morality, nor our way of life in such respects, and I cannot at present expound the difference;-but you would find it much the same in these parts. At Faenza there is Lord * * * * with an opera girl; and at the inn in the same town is a Neapolitan Prince, who serves the wife of the Gonfaloniere of that city. I am on duty here- so you see Così fan tutti e tutte.' “I have my horses here, saddle as well as carriage, and ride or drive every day in the forest, the Pineta, the scene of Boccaccio's novel, and Dryden's fable of Honoria, &c. &c.; and I see my Dama every day; but I feel seriously uneasy about her health, which seems very precarious. In losing her, I should lose a being who has run great risks on my account, and whom I have every reason to love-but I must not think this possible. I do not know what I should do if she died, but I ought to blow my brains out-and I hope that I should. Her husband is a very polite personage, but I wish he would not carry me out in his coach and six, like Whittington and his cat. "You ask me if I mean to continue D. J., &c. How should I know? What encouragement do you give me, all of you, with your nonsensical prudery? publish the two Cantos, and then you will see. I desired Mr. Kinnaird to speak to you on a little matter of business; either he has not spoken, or you have not answered. You are a pretty pair, but I will be even with you both. I perceive that Mr. Hobhouse 1 ["Sweet hour of twilight! — in the solitude The Vice-Consul of Mr. Hoppner. 401 "Thanks for your letter and for Madame's. I will answer it directly. Will you recollect whether I did not consign to you one or two receipts of Madame Mocenigo's for houserent (I am not sure of this, but think I did-if not, they will be in my drawers) — and will you desire Mr. Dorville to have the goodness to see if Edgecombe has receipts to all payments hitherto made by him on my account, and that there are no debts at Venice? On your answer, I shall send order of further remittance to carry on my household expenses, as my present return to Venice is very problematical; and it may happen- but I can say nothing positiveevery thing with me being indecisive and undecided, except the disgust which Venice excites when fairly compared with any other city in this part of Italy. When I say Venice, I mean the Venetians—the city itself is superb as its history — but the people are what I never thought them till they taught me to think so. "The best way will be to leave Allegra with Antonio's spouse till I can decide something about her and myself— but I thought that you would have had an answer from Mrs. V- -r. You have had bore enough with me and mine already. "I greatly fear that the Guiccioli is going into a consumption, to which her constitution tends. Thus it is with every thing and every body for whom I feel any thing like a real attachment ; —'War, death, or discord, doth lay siege to them.' I never even could keep alive a dog that I liked or that liked me. Her symptoms are obstinate cough of the lungs, and occasional fever, &c. &c., and there are latent causes of an eruption in the skin, which she foolishly repelled into the system two years ago: but I have made them send her case to Aglietti; and have begged the north of England, who, having seen the little Allegra at Mr. Hoppner's, took an interest in the poor child's fate, and having no family of her own, offered to adopt and provide for this little girl, if Lord Byron would consent to renounce all claim to her. At first he seemed not disinclined to enter into her views so far, at least, as giving permission that she should take the child with her to England and educate it; but the entire surrender of his paternal authority he would by no means consent to. The proposed arrangement accordingly was never carried into effect. Dd |