“How do _you_ manage?  I think you told me, at Venice, that your spirits did not keep up without a little claret.  I _can_ drink, and bear a good deal of wine (as you may recollect in England); but it don’t exhilarate—­it makes me savage and suspicious, and even quarrelsome.  Laudanum has a similar effect; but I can take much of _it_ without any effect at all.  The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a close of _salts_—­I mean in the afternoon, after their effect.[58] But one can’t take _them_ like champagne.

     “Excuse this old woman’s letter; but my _lemancholy_ don’t depend
     upon health, for it is just the same, well or ill, or here or
     there.

     “Yours,” &c.

[Footnote 58:  It was, no doubt, from a similar experience of its effects that Dryden always took physic when about to write any thing of importance.  His caricature, Bayes, is accordingly made to say, “When I have a grand design, I ever take physic and let blood; for, when you would have pure swiftness of thought and fiery flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part;—­in short,” &c. &c.

On this subject of the effects of medicine upon the mind and spirits, some curious facts and illustrations have been, with his usual research, collected by Mr. D’Israeli, in his amusing “Curiosities of Literature.”]

* * * * *

LETTER 462.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, October 9. 1821.

     “You will please to present or convey the enclosed poem to Mr.
     Moore.  I sent him another copy to Paris, but he has probably left
     that city.

“Don’t forget to send me my first act of ‘Werner’ (if Hobhouse can find it amongst my papers)—­send it by the post (to Pisa); and also cut out Harriet Lee’s ‘German’s Tale’ from the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ and send it in a letter also.  I began that tragedy in 1815.

“By the way, you have a good deal of my prose tracts in MS.?  Let me have proofs of them all again—­I mean the controversial ones, including the last two or three years of time.  Another question!—­The Epistle of St. Paul, which I translated from the Armenian, for what reason have you kept it back, though you published that stuff which gave rise to the ‘Vampire?’ Is it because you are afraid to print any thing in opposition to the cant of the Quarterly about Manicheism?  Let me have a proof of that Epistle directly.  I am a better Christian than those parsons of yours, though not paid for being so.

     “Send—­Faber’s Treatise on the Cabiri.

     “Sainte Croix’s Mysteres du Paganisme (scarce, perhaps, but to be
     found, as Mitford refers to his work frequently).