him, and his inability to understand for what purpose they had been kept back, “unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence.”  Hobhouse, and others, during the four succeeding years, ineffectually endeavoured to persuade the poet to return to England.  Moore and others insist that Byron’s heart was at home when his presence was abroad, and that, with all her faults, he loved his country still.  Leigh Hunt, on the contrary, asserts that he cared nothing for England or its affairs.  Like many men of genius, Byron was never satisfied with what he had at the time.  “Romae Tibur amem ventosus Tibure Romam.”  At Seaham he is bored to death, and pants for the excitement of the clubs; in London society he longs for a desert or island in the Cyclades; after their separation, he begins to regret his wife; after his exile, his country.  “Where,” he exclaimed to Hobhouse, “is real comfort to be found out of England?” He frequently fell into the mood in which he wrote the verse,—­

  Yet I was born where men are proud to be,
  Not without cause:  and should I leave behind
  Th’immortal island of the sage and free,
  And seek me out a home by a remoter sea?

But the following, to Murray (June 7, 1819), is equally sincere.  “Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments of Bologna; for instance—­

  ’Martini Luigi
  Implora pace.’

  ’Lucrezia Picini
  Implora eterna quiete.’”

Can anything be more full of pathos?  These 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 death-like prayer that can arise from the grave—­’implora pace.’  “I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigner’s burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see these 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.  I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country.”  Hunt’s view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer the truth than Moore’s; for with all Byron’s insight into Italian vice, he hated more the master vice of England—­hypocrisy; and much of his greatest, and in a sense latest, because unfinished work, is the severest, as it might be the wholesomest, satire ever directed against a great nation since the days of Juvenal and Tacitus.

In September (1817) Byron entered into negotiations, afterwards completed, for renting a country house among the Euganean hills near Este, from Mr. Hoppner, the English Consul at Venice, who bears frequent testimony to his kindness and courtesy.  In October we find him settled for the winter in Venice, where he first occupied his old quarters, in the Spezieria, and afterwards hired one of the palaces of the Countess Mocenigo on