has been ill also, and I have been almost obliged to run away with a married woman; but with some difficulty, and many internal struggles, I reconciled the lady with her lord, and cured the fever of the child with bark, and my own with cold water.  I think of setting out for England by the Tyrol in a few days, so that I could wish you to direct your next letter to Calais.  Excuse my writing in great haste and late in the morning, or night, whichever you please to call it.  The third Canto of ‘Don Juan’ is completed, in about two hundred stanzas; very decent, I believe, but do not know, and it is useless to discuss until it be ascertained if it may or may not be a property.

“My present determination to quit Italy was unlooked for; but I have explained the reasons in letters to my sister and Douglas Kinnaird, a week or two ago.  My progress will depend upon the snows of the Tyrol, and the health of my child, who is at present quite recovered; but I hope to get on well, and am

     “Yours ever and truly.

     “P.S.  Many thanks for your letters, to which you are not to
     consider this as an answer, but as an acknowledgment.”

* * * * *

The struggle which, at the time of my visit to him, I had found Lord Byron so well disposed to make towards averting, as far as now lay in his power, some of the mischievous consequences which, both to the object of his attachment and himself, were likely to result from their connection, had been brought, as the foregoing letters show, to a crisis soon after I left him.  The Count Guiccioli, on his arrival at Venice, insisted, as we have seen, that his lady should return with him; and, after some conjugal negotiations, in which Lord Byron does not appear to have interfered, the young Contessa consented reluctantly to accompany her lord to Ravenna, it being first covenanted that, in future, all communication between her and her lover should cease.

“In a few days after this,” says Mr. Hoppner, in some notices of his noble friend with which he has favoured me, “he returned to Venice, very much out of spirits, owing to Madame Guiccioli’s departure, and out of humour with every body and every thing around him.  We resumed our rides at the Lido; and I did my best not only to raise his spirits, but to make him forget his absent mistress, and to keep him to his purpose of returning to England.  He went into no society; and having no longer any relish for his former occupation, his time, when he was not writing, hung heavy enough on hand.”

The promise given by the lovers not to correspond was, as all parties must have foreseen, soon violated; and the letters Lord Byron addressed to the lady, at this time, though written in a language not his own, are rendered frequently even eloquent by the mere force of the feeling that governed him—­a feeling which could not have owed its fuel to fancy alone, since now that reality had been so long substituted, it still burned on.  From one of these letters, dated November 25th, I shall so far presume upon the discretionary power vested in me, as to lay a short extract or two before the reader—­not merely as matters of curiosity, but on account of the strong evidence they afford of the struggle between passion and a sense of right that now agitated him.