test with them. The Fornarina went into the palazzo, but was by no means convinced that the two ladies did not come with hostile intentions. She believed, and probably remains in the same notion to this day, that they came to cut his lordship out of his own palace, and to carry him off like one of the heroines of Ariosto.

At length her passion became so troublesome that Lord Byron, who was soon sick of having even happiness thrust upon him, resolved to get rid of her, and with no small difficulty effected her expulsion from his house. She, however, returned, like the recollection of a pleasant vice,' to scourge him, and surprised him one day by running into the room in which he was dining. Finding that he would not listen to her entreaties to be received again, she caught up a knife and swore that she would kill herself before him. However much he was frightened at her threats, he knew that it would be very unwise to let her see his fear, and he therefore only laughed at her. More enraged than ever at this—and yet not mad enough to kill herself—she flew into the balcony, and jumped thence into the canal, where the coolness of the water somewhat restored her to her senses. It was not very deep: she was soon taken out, by some of the gondoliers who were passing, and carried home to her husband, where—to end this romance as some others cnd-she lived very happily ever after.

Another adventure of Lord Byron's had like to have brought a more serious termination. In Italy, as in some other places on the Continent, flirtation, dans toute la force du phrase, is quietly permitted with married women; but young ladies, who have yet to make their fortunes by establishing themselves, must not be approached excepting with serious intentions;—so different is the interest taken by fathers and brothers for their female relations from that which is felt by husbands for their wives. Lord Byron had been paying civilities to a lady of the former description, and had flattered himself that, by dint of sonuetteering and serenading, he had made an impression on her, when he was surprised by a visit from a police-officer and a priest, who came to remonstrate with him on the subject.

Lord Byron's disinclination to receive the visits of his countrymen during his stay at Venice has been very absurdly exaggerated and misrepresented. It is true that he has himself been the cause of this in a great measure by the angry note which he published at the end of one of his poems, breathing a contempt for every thing English, which is in itself very foolish, and which, if it had been really felt, would in all probability, for that very reason, never have been expressed.

He was induced, however, to commit this absurdity by an impertinent observation in a book called 'Sketches of Italy,' the author of which said she might have been introduced to Lord Byron, 'but declined the offer, Perhaps, too, the inconvenient intrusion of persons who forced themselves into his house, and went to look at him as they would at any other wonder, had tried and vexed a temper not the most enduring in the world. Every body who has lived on the Continent knows that the behaviour of a large portion of English travellers is not such as would induce many men to clain or even to acknowledge any connexion with them.

When Lord Byron was properly introduced to persons who had any pretensions to his acquaintance he never failed to treat them with respect, and even cordiality. Even strangers with whom he met accidentally, if they were persons of good breeding and of information, never failed to experience that polite frankness which was fully as much a part of his nature as the habit of his education.

With all his profligacy Lord Byron enjoyed a considerable share of popularity: his sentiments were known to be liberal, and this, of course, recommended him to the groaning people of this once free and flourishing, but now degraded and almost desolate, city. His habits were expensive; he kept many servants, and behaved with the utmost kindness and liberality to all of them. He was charitable and munificent to a degree rather uncommon; for the parsimony of the English in Venice had created an unfavorable opinion against them among the lower orders of the people. Of the instances of his charity probably many might be collected, but that these things are forgotten when all the evil which such men as Lord Byron do is writ in brass.'

There is one mark of the goodness of his heart and the generosity of his temper which we could not forgive ourselves if we did not preserve:

The house of a shoemaker, near his lordship's residence in St. Samuel, was destroyed by fire. The poor man lost every article belonging to him, and was, with a large family, reduced to a most pitiable condition. Lord Byron, having ascertained the afflicting circumstance of the calamity, ordered a new and superior habitation to be inmediately built for the sufferer, the whole expense of which was borne by his lordship, who also presented the unfortunate tradesman with a sum equal in value to the whole of his lost stock in trade and furniture.'

Lord Byron was attended during the whole of his stay in Venice by his servant Fletcher, who seems to have been as faithful and as foolish a servant as ever man had. This man had been a shoemaker in the

neighbourhood of Newstead, and was so much attached to his master that he even found courage enough to accompany him on his travels in the East; no unequivocal proof of affection in a man who hated foreign parts, and loved a wife whom he left at home. Lord Byron's letters to his mother were full of jokes about Fletcher, who seems to have given him at least as much trouble as he occasioned him amusement. He says that in Turkey the valet used always to be sighing after the delights he had left in England, among which were included beef, porter, tea, and his wife Sally. His fears (for valour was no part of Fletcher's character) were troublesome enough sometimes, when it was necessary for the travellers to assume the virtue of courage if they had it not.' When the letters from Lord Byron to his inother shall be published-and why they are withheld no man can guess-for there is not a word in them to hurt the feelings of any human being-it will be seen that the faithful servant cuts a prominent and always a funny figure. In one of them, if we remember rightly, Lord Byron says something to this effect:

'Fletcher, after having been toasted, roasted, and baked, and grilled, and eaten by all sorts of creeping things, begins to philosophize; is grown a refined as well as a resigned character; and promises at his return to be an ornament to his own parish, and a very prominent person in the future family pedigree of the Fletchers, who I take to be Goths by their accomplishments, Greeks by their acuteness, and ancient Saxons by their appetite. He, Fletcher, begs leave to send half a dozen sighs to Sally, his spouse, and wonders (though I do not) that his ill-written and worse spelt letters have never come to hand. As for that matter, there is no great loss in either of our letters, saving and except that I wish you to know that we are well, and warm enough at this present writing. God knows you must not expect long letters at present, for they are written with the sweat of my brow, I assure you.'

Lord Byron used to say that Fletcher vexed him past endurance upon one occasion, when he was so much provoked that he was near shooting him. It was when Lord Byron was visiting the Pantheon; and, while his soul was burning with indignation at the havoc which had been committed there, Fletcher came up to him with a look of ineffable stupidity, and said, pointing to one of the massy fragments of the ruin, Law! if we had this marvel in England, what nice mantel-pieces we could make out of it, my lord.' It will be admitted this was enough to move the choler of a less irritable person than Lord Byron. Poor Fletcher, however, escaped shooting.

Lord Byron was at all times of his life plagued by female corre

spondents, some of whose letters breathed the passion with which his lordship's poetry had inspired them in no equivocal language. His lordship did not treat their favours as they deserved, for, if he did not choose to reply to the epistles, he should have consigned them to the flames. He had no secrets himself, and was the worst man in the world to keep those of other people: the letters were tossed about, and fell into Fletcher's hands, who, when he had a love-letter to com pose on his own account, availed himself of the passionate expressions of his master's fair correspondents. One of his favorite figures extracted from one of these letters, and that which he used when he wanted to make an irresistible impression upon the object of his passion, was to say, that he was 'a blasted laurel struck by a metre.'

The assiduity with which he imitated his master's whimsical extravagances, and which, odd as they were in poor Lord Byron, became in Fletcher's travestimento a thousand times more funny, procured him the nick-name of Leporello, by which title Lord Byron usually designated him.

Notwithstanding these and some other oddities Fletcher was a very affectionate and faithful servant to a master who deserved a good servant, and who knew his good qualities too well not to look at his whimsicalities in the right point of view.

The sort of life he led at Venice, however, was not long to Lord Byron's taste. Among his virtues, if, indeed, it be a virtue, constancy was not one: he knew this, and confessed it in Don Juan.' He used seriously to excuse his fickleness, and would give (who could not?) many reasons, all excellent and unanswerable, why a man ought to change his enjoyments as soon as they had palled upon his taste. It may be very much questioned whether the dissipations of Venice were ever very much to his lordship's liking.

An event which contributed to wean Lord Byron from the tiresome and degrading frivolities of the life he had been leading at Venice was the arrival there of Mr. and Mrs. Shelley. For that gentleman he had long entertained a profound respect and esteem; and Mr. Shelley had, perhaps, more influence with Lord Byron than any other of his friends. It was not an influence acquired by preaching or advising, but arising from the high and merited opinion which Lord Byron entertained of Mr. Shelley's genius and character. The habits of no two men could be more directly opposite; and yet they were always good friends, and their intimacy was disturbed by none of those storms to which Lord Byron's other friendships were almost constantly ex

posed. Of Mr. Shelley's critical judgment, and of the rectitude and virtue of his mind, Lord Byron was fully convinced he knew, as every body who had any knowledge of that gentleman, must have been aware, that he had been misrepresented by the ignorant and dishonest reviews in the most absurd as well as the most wicked manner; and he knew also that, but for the retiring habits and the scorn in which Mr. Shelley held such attacks, their refutation would have been certain and easy. It had been Lord Byron's misfortune to be surrounded abroad by persons who were of an inferior rank to himself, and whose dependent situation prevented their advice from being of that character which, to be valuable, it should always possess-disinterestedness. Mr. Shelley was of as good a family as his own; the heir to a very large fortune, and in the possession of an ample competency: he, therefore, stood in a very difficult light from some of Lord Byron's Continental associates; and as he knew, too, that friendship, like other things of delicate growth, requires to be constantly cherished, he neither suffered it to be weakened by neglect, nor by a deficiency in those external forms which must always be mutually observed, and which, however valueless they may seem, are often as useful as they are agreeable.

In one of Mr. Shelley's poems, which has been published since his lamented death, he introduces Lord Byron under the character of a Venetian nobleman. The preface to that poem describes the personages who figure in it; and the sketch of Lord Byron is as vigorous and as faithful a portrait as was ever drawn by the hand of a master, and of a master, too, who knew every lineament of the mind and feelings of his subject:

Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius; and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud : he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and, instead of the latter having been enr ployed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other

Julian and Maddalo.