music of her perfect Italian, give a peculiar charm to every thing she utters. Grace and elegance seem component parts of her nature. Notwithstanding that she adores Lord Byron, it is evident that the exile and poverty of her aged father sometimes affect her spirits, and throw a shade of melancholy on her countenance, which adds to the deep interest this lovely girl creates.

Extraordinary pains,' said Lord Byron one day, were taken with the education of Teresa. Her conversation is lively, without being frivolous; without being learned, she has read all the best authors of her own and the French language. She often conceals what she knows, from the fear of being thought to know too much; possibly because she knows I am not fond of blues. To use an expression of Jeffrey's, "If she has blue stockings, she contrives that her petticoat shall hide them.""

About this period the intrigues of the Carbonari began to fill Italy with civil commotion, and suspicions were entertained even of persous who did not deserve to be suspected. Lord Byron was among the latter. For some reason or other, (it is not now perhaps worth while to inquire into it too curiously,) Lord Byron declined to interfere in any of the numerous cabals which were then going on in every town, almost in every house, in Italy. Nevertheless, as he was known to be the intimate friend of the Counts Gamba, he was believed by the Austrian government to favour their political notions.

The Counts Gamba were notorious adherents of the Carbonari faction;a faction, the distinguishing marks of which were, that its members were as ready to boast as they were slow to do-as active in creating disturbance as they were slow in fairly asserting the principles. they professed-and who had eternally the name of liberty in their mouths, while they practised ali kinds of vice, and cowardice, and treachery. The Austrian government could easily have put down by force of arms, as indeed they did afterwards, these flimsy intrigues; but it was thought in the mean time that such persons as the Gambas ought not to be allowed to disturb the quiet of Ravenna, for which reason they were ordered to quit that city, and the whole territory of Romagna, They retired to Pisa, where the Countess Guiccioli joined them, and continued to live in the same house with them.

Lord Byron was very fond of Ravenna, and he would willingly have resided there for a much longer period. The beauty of the surrounding scenery was not less an inducement to him to prefer it than the quiet and retirement of the place. It does not form a point for travel.

lers; but, lying out of the grande route, is a fine specimen of an Italian town, both as regards the aspect of the place and the society which it contains.

Mr. Medwin says Lord Byron frequently expressed his regret at leaving Ravenna.

'I was never tired of my rides in the pine-forest: it breathes of the Decameron; it is poetical ground. Francesca lived, and Dante was exiled and died, at Ravenna. There is something inspiring in such an air.'*

When, however, Lord Byron found that his friends the Gambas were compelled to quit this favorite place of his abode, he resolved to go also, and, since now all the hopes he had entertained of the Guiccioli's return were at an end, to take up his residence at Pisa.

The account which he gave to Mr. Medwin of the transactions preceding this event is a little exaggerated. There is too much swaggering in it, and his lordship does not show himself off in the most heroic light where he boasts of having a hundred stand of arms in his house, ready to be used when some bolder person should have struck the blow. If there is nothing good in rebellion, there is less in hanging back and being willing to help it, but exercising the wiser part of valour-discretion,' by watching the moment when it may have become safe to do so. This is one of the passages which, if Lord Byron really uttered, Mr. Med win ought not to have recollected.

'The people liked me as much as they hated the government. It, is not a little to say, I was popular with all the leaders of the Constitutional party. They knew that I came from a land of liberty, and The following lines will show the attachment Lord Byron had to the tranquil life he led at Ravenna:

Sweet hour of twilight, in the solitude

Of the pine forest and the silent shore

Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood,

Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'cr
To where the last Cæsarean fortress stood:
Ever-green forest! which Boccacio's lore
And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me,
How have I loved the twilight hour and thee!

The shrill cicalas, people of the pine,

Making their summer lives one ceaseless song,
Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine,
And vesper bell's that rose the boughs among.
Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza 105.

wished well to their cause. I would have espoused it too, and assisted them to shake off their fetters. They knew my character, for I had been living two years at Venice, where many of the Ravennese have houses. I did not, however, take part in their intrigues, nor join in their political coteries; but I had a magazine of one hundred stand of arms in the house, when every thing was ripe for revolt. A curse on Carignan's imbecility! I could have pardoned him that too, if he had not impeached his partisans. The proscription was immense in Romagna, and embraced many of the first nobles: almost all my friends, among the rest the Gambas, were included in it. They were exiled, and their possessions confiscated. They knew that this must eventually drive me out of the country. I did not follow them immediately; I was not to be bullied. I had myself fallen under the eye of the government. If they could have got sufficient proof, they would have arrested me but no one betrayed me; indeed there was nothing to betray. I had received a very high degree, without passing through the intermediate ranks. In that corner you see papers of one of their societies. Shortly after the plot was discovered I received several anonymous letters, advising me to discontinue my forest rides; but I entertained no apprehensions of treachery, and was more on horseback than ever. I never stir out without being well armed, and sleep with pistols. They knew that I never missed my aim; perhaps this saved me.'

This is in the true Captain Bobadil vein, and we wish, for Lord Byron's sake, that it had never been printed. At the same time we have no doubt of its veracity, so far as Mr. Medwin is concerned.

Upon quitting Ravenna, Lord Byron went to Pisa, where he took up his abode; and which place he did not quit, but for short intervals, until his final departure from Italy.

At Pisa Lord Byron completed the two first cantos of a poem, which is at once a monument of the powers of his mind and the frailty of his nature; of his wit and his inhumanity; of his sensibility and his want of feeling. It is unnecessary to add that this bundle of inconsistencies is no other than Don Juan.'

In this poem Lord Byron seemed resolved to give way to all that spite and malignity to which human nature is prone, but which men of feeling and reason usually control. For this he was justly censured at the time that his poem appeared; and the stain which it bas left upon his memory can never be wiped away. Every sense of manliness ought (even if Lord Byron had been more deeply injured than

he pretended to be) to have exempted Lady Byron, still his wife, from his harsh and scornful satire; and yet the whole of the beginning. of the poem is occupied with a cruel caricature of her. The first canto is in a vein pleasant enough; but under this seemingly playful covering are hidden words more bitter than the tongues of serpents. following is the abrupt beginning of this singular poem:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the Gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,

I'll therefore take our ancient friend, Don Juan:

We all have seen him in the pantomime
Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.

It proceeds thus:

In Seville was he born-a pleasant city,
Famous for oranges and women-he
Who has not seen it will be much to pity,

So says the proverb and I quite agree;
Of all the Spanish towns is none more pretty,
Cadiz perhaps but that you soon may see:
Don Juan's parents lived beside the river,

A noble stream, and called the Guadalquivir.

The

Then comes the description of Juan's mother, by whom it is too well known that Lord Byron meant to describe his own wife. To affect delicacy on this subject would be unjust to Lady Byron, because the knowledge of the falsehood and unfairness of the way in which she is introduced is now at least as notorious as the attack upon her:

His mother was a learned lady, famed

For every branch of every science known
In every Christian language ever named,
With virtues equalled by her wit alone;
She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,
And even the good with inward envy groan,
Finding themselves so very much exceeded
In their own way by all the things that she did.
Her memory was a mine: she knew by heart
All Calderon and greater part of Lope,

So that if any actor missed his part

She could have served him for a prompter's copy; For her Feinagle's were an useless art,

And he himself obliged to shut up shop-he
Could never make a memory so fine as

That which adorned the brain of Donna Inez.
Her favorite science was the mathematical,

Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity,
Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was Attic all,
Her serious sayings darkened to sublimity;
In short, in all things she was fairly what I call

A prodigy-her morning dress was dimity,
Her evening silk, or, in the summer, muslin,
And other stuffs, with which I won't stay puzzling.
She knew the Latin-that is the Lord's Prayer,'
And Greek-the alphabet-I'm nearly sure;
She read some French romances here and there,
Although her mode of speaking was not pure;
For native Spanish she had no great care,

At least her conversation was obscure;
Her thoughts were theorems, her words a problem,
As if she deemed that mystery would ennoble 'em.
She liked the English and the Hebrew tongue,
And said there was analogy between 'em ;

She proved it somehow out of sacred song,

But I must leave the proofs to those who've seen 'em ; But this I heard her say, and can't be wrong,

"

And all may think which way their judgments lean 'em, 'Tis strange the Hebrew noun which means I am," The English always use to govern d—n.'

Perfect she was; but, as perfection is
Insipid in this naughty world of ours,
Where our first parents never learned to kiss

Till they were exiled from their earlier bowers,
Where all was peace, and innocence, and bliss,

(I wonder how they got through the twelve hours),

Don Jose, like a fineal son of Eve,

Went plucking various fruit without her leave.