the Grand Canal.  Between this mansion, the cottage at Este, and the villa of La Mira, he divided his time for the next two years.  During the earlier part of his Venetian career he had continued to frequent the salon of the Countess Albrizzi, where he met with people of both sexes of some rank and standing who appreciated his genius, though some among them fell into absurd mistakes.  A gentleman of the company informing the hostess, in answer to some inquiry regarding Canova’s busts, that Washington, the American President, was shot in a duel by Burke, “What, in the name of folly, are you thinking of?” said Byron, perceiving that the speaker was confounding Washington with Hamilton, and Burke with Burr.  He afterwards transferred himself to the rival coterie of the Countess Benzoni, and gave himself up with little reserve to the intrigues which cast discredit on this portion of his life.  Nothing is so conducive to dissipation as despair, and Byron had begun to regard the Sea-Cybele as a Sea-Sodom—­when he wrote, “To watch a city die daily, as she does, is a sad contemplation.  I sought to distract my mind from a sense of her desolation and my own solitude, by plunging into a vortex that was anything but pleasure.”  In any case, he forsook the “Dame,” and, by what his biographer calls a “descent in the scale of refinement, for which nothing but the wayward state of his mind can account,” sought the companions of his leisure hours among the wearers of the “fazzioli.”  The carnivals of the years 1818, 1819, mark the height of his excesses.  Early in the former, Mariana Segati fell out of favour, owing to Byron’s having detected her in selling the jewels he had given as presents, and so being led to suspect a large mercenary element in her devotion.  To her succeeded Margarita Cogni, the wife of a baker who proved as accommodating as his predecessor, the linen-draper.  This woman was decidedly a character, and Senor Castelar has almost elevated her into a heroine.  A handsome virago, with brown shoulders, and black hair, endowed with the strength of an Amazon, “a face like Faustina’s, and the figure of a Juno—­tall and energetic as a pythoness,” she quartered herself for twelve months in the palace as “Donna di governo,” and drove the servants about without let or hindrance.  Unable to read or write she intercepted his lordship’s letters to little purpose; but she had great natural business talents, reduced by one half the expenses of his household, kept everything in good order, and, when her violences roused his wrath, turned it off with some ready retort or witticism.  She was very devout, and would cross herself three times at the Angelus.  One instance, of a different kind of devotion, from Byron’s own account, is sufficiently graphic:—­“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, and wind