Lord Byron prefers Tuscany or Lucca, and is trying to persuade them to adopt his views.  He has made me write a long letter to her to engage her to remain.  An odd thing enough for an utter stranger to write on subjects of the utmost delicacy to his friend’s mistress—­but it seems destined that I am always to have some active part in every body’s affairs whom I approach.  I have set down, in tame Italian, the strongest reasons I can think of against the Swiss emigration.  To tell you the truth, I should be very glad to accept as my fee his establishment in Tuscany.  Ravenna is a miserable place:  the people are barbarous and wild, and their language the most infernal patois that you can imagine.  He would be in every respect better among the Tuscans.

“He has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly fine.  It sets him not only above, but far above all the poets of the day.  Every word has the stamp of immortality.  This canto is in a style (but totally free from indelicacy, and sustained with incredible ease and power) like the end of the second canto:  there is not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be cancelled:  it fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached,—­of producing something wholly new, and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful.  It may be vanity, but I think I see the trace of my earnest exhortations to him, to create something wholly new. * * * *

“I am sure, if I asked, it would not be refused; yet there is something in me that makes it impossible.  Lord Byron and I are excellent friends; and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claim to a higher station than I possess, or did I possess a higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and I would freely ask him any favour.  Such is not now the case:  the demon of mistrust and of pride lurks between two persons in our situation, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse.  This is a tax, and a heavy one, which we must pay for being human.  I think the fault is not on my side; nor is it likely,—­I being the weaker.  I hope that in the next world these things will be better managed.  What is passing in the heart of another rarely escapes the observation of one who is a strict anatomist of his own. * * *

“Lord Byron here has splendid apartments in the palace of Count Guiccioli, who is one of the richest men in Italy.  She is divorced, with an allowance of twelve thousand crowns a year;—­a miserable pittance from a man who has a hundred and twenty thousand a year.  There are two monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses, all of whom (except the horses) walk about the house like the masters of it.  Tita, the Venetian, is here, and operates as my valet—­a fine fellow, with a prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, and is the most good-natured-looking fellow I ever saw.

     “Wednesday, Ravenna.