“I sha’n’t go to Naples.  It is but the second best sea-view, and I have seen the first and third, viz.  Constantinople and Lisbon, (by the way, the last is but a river-view; however, they reckon it after Stamboul and Naples, and before Genoa,) and Vesuvius is silent, and I have passed by AEtna.  So I shall e’en return to Venice in July; and if you write, I pray you to address to Venice, which is my head, or rather my heart, quarters.

“My late physician, Dr. Polidori, is here on his way to England, with the present Lord G * * and the widow of the late earl.  Dr. Polidori has, just now, no more patients, because his patients are no more.  He had lately three, who are now all dead—­one embalmed.  Horner and a child of Thomas Hope’s are interred at Pisa and Rome.  Lord G * * died of an inflammation of the bowels:  so they took them out, and sent them (on account of their discrepancies), separately from the carcass, to England.  Conceive a man going one way, and his intestines another, and his immortal soul a third!—­was there ever such a distribution?  One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine.  I only know if once mine gets out, I’ll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that or any other.

“And so poor dear Mr. Maturin’s second tragedy has been neglected by the discerning public! * * will be d——­d glad of this, and d——­d without being glad, if ever his own plays come upon ’any stage.’

     “I wrote to Rogers the other day, with a message for you.  I hope
     that he flourishes.  He is the Tithonus of poetry—­immortal
     already.  You and I must wait for it.

“I hear nothing—­know nothing.  You may easily suppose that the English don’t seek me, and I avoid them.  To be sure, there are but few or none here, save passengers.  Florence and Naples are their Margate and Ramsgate, and much the same sort of company too, by all accounts, which hurts us among the Italians.

“I want to hear of Lalla Rookh—­are you out?  Death and fiends! why don’t you tell me where you are, what you are, and how you are?  I shall go to Bologna by Ferrara, instead of Mantua:  because I would rather see the cell where they caged Tasso, and where he became mad and * *, than his own MSS. at Modena, or the Mantuan birthplace of that harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow.  I saw Verona and Vicenza on my way here—­Padua too.

“I go alone,—­but alone, because I mean to return here.  I only want to see Rome.  I have not the least curiosity about Florence, though I must see it for the sake of the Venus, &c. &c.; and I wish also to see the Fall of Terni.  I think to return to Venice by Ravenna and Rimini, of both of which I mean to