PS.  I have read Hodgson’s ‘Friends’.  He is right in defending Pope against the bastard pelicans of the poetical winter day, who add insult to their parricide, by sucking the blood of the parent of English real poetry,—­poetry without fault,—­and then spurning the bosom which fed them.

TO THE SAME

The cemetery at Bologna

Bologna, 7 June, 1819.

...  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 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 joked—­he 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 anything 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’.  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’.  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.