Ugo Foscolo, who was eccentric to an excess, and very extravagant, had many attached friends, though he tried them sorely.  To Mr. Murray he became one of the troubles of private as well as publishing life.  He had a mania for building, and a mania for ornamentation, but he was very short of money for carrying out his freaks.  He thought himself at the same time to be perfectly moderate, simple, and sweet-tempered.  He took a house in South Bank, Regent’s Park, which he named Digamma Cottage—­from his having contributed to the Quarterly Review an article on the Digamma—­and fitted it up in extravagant style.

Foscolo could scarcely live at peace with anybody, and, as the result of one of his numerous altercations, he had to fight a duel.  “We are,” Lady Dacre wrote to Murray (December 1823), “to have the whole of Foscolo’s duel to-morrow.  He tells me that it is not about a ‘Fair lady’:  thank heaven!”

Foscolo was one of Mr. Murray’s inveterate correspondents—­about lectures, about translations, about buildings, about debts, about loans, and about borrowings.  On one occasion Mr. Murray received from him a letter of thirteen pages quarto.  A few sentences of this may be worth quoting: 

Mr. Foscolo to John Murray.

SOUTH BANK, August 20, 1822.

“During six years (for I landed in England the 10th September, 1816) I have constantly laboured under difficulties the most distressing; no one knows them so well as yourself, because no one came to my assistance with so warm a friendship or with cares so constant and delicate.  My difficulties have become more perplexing since the Government both of the Ionian Islands and Italy have precluded even the possibility of my returning to the countries where a slender income would be sufficient, and where I would not be under the necessity of making a degrading use of my faculties.  I was born a racehorse; and after near forty years of successful racing, I am now drawing the waggon—­nay, to be the teacher of French to my copyists, and the critic of English to my translators!-to write sophistry about criticism, which I always considered a sort of literary quackery, and to put together paltry articles for works which I never read.  Indeed, if I have not undergone the doom of almost all individuals whose situation becomes suddenly opposed to their feelings and habits, and if I am not yet a lunatic, I must thank the mechanical strength of my nerves.  My nerves, however, will not withstand the threatenings of shame which I have always contemplated with terror.  Time and fortune have taught me to meet all other evils with fortitude; but I grow every day more and more a coward at the idea of the approach of a stigma on my character; and as now I must live and die in England, and get the greater part of my subsistence from my labour, I ought to reconcile, if not labour with literary reputation, at least labour and life with a spotless name.”