the liaison till now; and rogue, if he did know it, and waited, for some bad end, to divulge it.  In short, there has been nothing like it since the days of Guido di Polenta’s family, in these parts.

“If the man has me taken off, like Polonius ’say, he made a good end,’—­for a melodrama.  The principal security is, that he has not the courage to spend twenty scudi—­the average price of a clean-handed bravo—­otherwise there is no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with one servant, and sometimes an acquaintance, who latterly looks a little queer in solitary bits of bushes.

     “Good bye.—­Write to yours ever,” &c.

[Footnote 74:  M. Lamartine.]

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LETTER 377.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, June 7. 1820.

“Enclosed is something which will interest you, to wit, the opinion of the greatest man of Germany—­perhaps of Europe—­upon one of the great men of your advertisements, (all ‘famous hands,’ as Jacob Tonson used to say of his ragamuffins,)—­in short, a critique of Goethe’s upon Manfred.  There is the original, an English translation, and an Italian one; keep them all in your archives,—­for the opinions of such a man as Goethe, whether favourable or not, are always interesting—­and this is more so, as favourable.  His Faust I never read, for I don’t know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred.  The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar.  Acknowledge this letter.

     “Yours ever.

“P.S.  I have received Ivanhoe;—­good.  Pray send me some tooth-powder and tincture of myrrh, by Waite, &c.  Ricciardetto should have been translated literally, or not at all.  As to puffing Whistlecraft, it won’t do.  I’ll tell you why some day or other.  Cornwall’s a poet, but spoilt by the detestable schools of the day.  Mrs. Hemans is a poet also, but too stiltified and apostrophic,—­and quite wrong.  Men died calmly before the Christian era, and since, without Christianity:  witness the Romans, and, lately, Thistlewood, Sandt, and Lovel—­men who ought to have been weighed down with their crimes, even had they believed.  A deathbed is a matter of nerves and constitution, and not of religion.  Voltaire was frightened, Frederick of Prussia not:  Christians the same, according to their strength rather than their creed.  What does H * * H * * mean by his stanza? which is octave got drunk or gone mad.  He ought to have his ears boxed with Thor’s hammer for rhyming so fantastically.”

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