from me.  You may as well talk to the wind, and better—­for it will at least convey your accents a little further than they would otherwise have gone; whereas I shall neither echo nor acquiesce in your ‘exquisite reasons.’  You may omit the note of reference to Hobhouse’s travels, in Canto second, and you will put as motto to the whole—­

        ’Difficile est proprie communia dicere.’—­HORACE.

“A few days ago I sent you all I know of Polidori’s Vampire.  He may do, say, or write, what he pleases, but I wish he would not attribute to me his own compositions.  If he has any thing of mine in his possession, the MS. will put it beyond controversy; but I scarcely think that any one who knows me would believe the thing in the Magazine to be mine, even if they saw it in my own hieroglyphics.

“I write to you in the agonies of a sirocco, which annihilates me; and I have been fool enough to do four things since dinner, which are as well omitted in very hot weather:  1stly, * * * *; 2dly, to play at billiards from 10 to 12, under the influence of lighted lamps, that doubled the heat; 3dly, to go afterwards into a red-hot conversazione of the Countess Benzoni’s; and, 4thly, to begin this letter at three in the morning:  but being begun, it must be finished.

     “Ever very truly and affectionately yours,

     “B.

“P.S.  I petition for tooth-brushes, powder, magnesia, Macassar oil (or Russia), the sashes, and Sir Nl.  Wraxall’s Memoirs of his own Times.  I want, besides, a bull-dog, a terrier, and two Newfoundland dogs; and I want (is it Buck’s?) a life of Richard 3d, advertised by Longman long, long, long ago; I asked for it at least three years since.  See Longman’s advertisements.”

* * * * *

About the middle of April, Madame Guiccioli had been obliged to quit Venice with her husband.  Having several houses on the road from Venice to Ravenna, it was his habit to stop at these mansions, one after the other, in his journeys between the two cities; and from all these places the enamoured young Countess now wrote to Lord Byron, expressing, in the most passionate and pathetic terms, her despair at leaving him.  So utterly, indeed, did this feeling overpower her, that three times, in the course of her first day’s journey, she was seized with fainting fits.  In one of her letters, which I saw when at Venice, dated, if I recollect right, from “Ca Zen, Cavanelle di Po,” she tells him that the solitude of this place, which she had before found irksome, was, now that one sole idea occupied her mind, become dear and welcome to her, and promises that, as soon as she arrives at Ravenna, “she will, according to his wish, avoid all general society, and devote herself to reading, music, domestic occupations, riding on horseback,—­every thing, in short, that she knew he would most like.”  What a change for a young and simple girl, who, but a few weeks before, had thought only of society and the world, but who now saw no other happiness but in the hope of making herself worthy, by seclusion and self-instruction, of the illustrious object of her devotion!