for whom he seems to have entertained, throughout life, a sincere respect and affection. "It was in the spring of 1815," says Walter Scott, " that, chancing to be in London, I had the advantage of a personal introduction to Lord Byron. Report had prepared me to meet a man of peculiar habits and quick temper, and I had some doubts whether we were likely to suit each other in society. I was most agreeably disappointed in this respect. I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind." To Scott, Lord Byron did not seem, at this time, to be particularly well informed, and he says, that he recommended him to read many things (which, no doubt, he could) that he had never read before. "The last time we met," Walter Scott continues, "was in 1815, after I returned from France: I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humour. After one of the gayest parties I ever was present at, I set off for Scotland, and never saw Lord Byron again." Several lettersone about every six months-passed between the two poets; and, after the fatal event at Missolonghi, we owe to "the Ariosto of the North" those kindly and beautiful expressions :-“The voice of just blame and malignant censure are at once silenced; and we feel almost as if the great luminary of heaven had suddenly disappeared from the sky, at the moment when every telescope was levelled for the examination of the spots which had dimmed its brightness!"

In the mean time his marriage, even yet, seems to have entered no very unfavourable signs of the hymeneal zodiac. "Lady B-," he says, "is better than three months advanced in her progress to maternity, and, we hope, likely to go well through with it. We have been very little out this season, and I wish her to keep quiet in her present situation."

But as love is pronounced impossible in a cottage but shabbily furnished, so it finds no comfortable abode in a mansion in Piccadilly where the furniture is under the sentence of execution. Lord Byron's increased expenditure, which the small sum of ready money he received from Lady Byron (10,0007.) could not, for any length of time, support, and the long accumulation of early embarrassments, which the supposition that he was married to an heiress now thrust upon him, exposed him daily to the deepest grievance of which a proud spirit can be susceptible-the necessity of denying that which you know you have a right to give. “As his difficulties augmented, his mention of the partner of his home became more rare and formal; and there was observable, through some of his letters, a feeling of unquiet. It was at this moment, at the topmost tide-mark of his misfortunes, that Lady Byron somewhat unexpectedly took the resolution of quitting him. She left London on a visit to her father, where she was to be joined by Lord Byron in a few weeks. They parted kindly, and even warmly, and Lady B. wrote her husband a fond and playful letter

on the road. But no sooner had she arrived at Kirkby Mallory, than Sir R. Milbanke wrote to say she would return no more."

With an imagination that could conceive miseries which did not actually exist, Byron had a strength and rebelliousness of character which always supported him against real grievances; and his buoyant and poetical spirit sprang at once, in his reverses, to the blue skies and hallowed scenes of his early wanderings, where a proud and solitary soul knew that it would find companionship.

"I shall be glad to see you, if you like to call," he says to Mr. Rogers, "though I am at present contending with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,' some of which have struck at me from a quarter whence I did not indeed expect them. But no matter, there is a world elsewhere, and I will cut my way through it."

The circumstances of this separation,-Byron's eulogy and justification of his wife, I mean, immediately upon the separation (since he appears to have entertained far deeper feelings of a sense of injury at a subsequent period of his life),— the affectionate manner, also, in which his wife's last letter was written, and, notwithstanding this, the mysterious justification of her conduct by Dr. Lushington,-have all tended to give that extraordinary colouring, shed more or less over every event of Byron's life, to this, the most important.

Not long before his death, with that worldly knowledge for which he almost stands alone among minstrels, he himself said:-"The causes of my separation were too simple, my dear sir, to be easily found out." For my own part, if not easily discovered, I cannot help thinking that they are pretty easily explained. Lady Byron was, as it appears, almost singularly ignorant of the poetical character. She seems to have considered as distinctive marks of madness traits which, I will venture to say, no person of strong genius and passions ever passed a year in the society of another without displaying.

Byron was affected to hysterics at seeing Kean in the part of Sir Giles Overreach (a similar story is told of | Alfieri); and he threw a favourite watch, in a fit of indignation, into the fire. Lady Byron thought him mad in consequence, and, with that agreeable prepossession in her mind, viewed every ordinary circumstance. No marvel, then, that ordinary circumstances all appeared extraordinary; and that, instead of regarding any incidental weakness with forgiveness, she looked upon it with horror. No marvel that the impression she made upon Dr. Lushington, as the result of her own impressions, should have dictated his advice. Nor is this all. Lord Byron, as many men,--for I have known several,—of an imaginative turn of mind, had a pleasure in alluding to himself and his life in a manner less careful of exciting sympathy than of awakening

regular, and rather aquiline; mouth small, skin clear and soft, with a kind of hectic colour, forehead remarkably good; her hair is of the dark gloss, curl and colour of Lady J's; her figure is light and pretty; she is a famous songstress-scientifically so; her natural voice (in conversation I mean) is very sweet, and the naïveté of the Venetian dialect is always pleasing in the mouth of a woman."

With this lady, who, if beautiful, does not seem, from what I have heard, to have been of that description of beauty which is beyond all price, Lord Byron formed a kind of half sentimental attachment, strong enough to take him hastily back from Rome, which he had visited in the spring of 1817, though not before he had drawn from the eternal city an inspiration which has given it a new lease of immortality. On his return he composed the fourth canto of Childe Harold, the most faultless in its magnificence of any of his poems. And now, once more at Venice, he seems to have had that feverish thirst for pleasure which betokens any thing but a healthy enjoyment of it. "I will work the mine of my youth," he says, amidst the restless revels of a Venetian carnival, "till the last veins of the ore." Removing from the house of Marianna's husband, he took a palace on the grand canal, and as Mr. Moore says, with a hypocritical little shudder, * commenced a kind of life destructive to his physical energies, and degrading to those of the mind." For the life Lord Byron thought proper to adopt, there is little excuse, but it is certainly rather amusing to see the patrician morality of his courtly biographer, who adds that, "it was unluckily among the beauties of the lower orders (the ladies of the higher orders being 'uglies' by the by), that Byron selected the companions of his disengaged hours."

寫

It is but a fair justification of his tastes in this particular, to quote the description the Poet has given of the dark-eyed sultana of his low-lived haram :"Since you desire the story of Margarita Cogni, you shall be told it, though it may be lengthy.

"Her face is the fine Venetian cast of the old time; her figure, though perhaps too tall, is not less fineand taken altogether in the national dress.

"In the summer of 1817, **** and myself were sauntering on horseback along the Brenta one evening, when, amongst a group of peasants, we remarked two girls as the prettiest we had seen for some time. About this period, there had been great distress in the country, and I had a little relieved some of the people. Generosity makes a great figure at very little cost in Venetian livres, and mine had probably been exaggerated as an Englishman's. Whether they remarked us looking at them or no, I know not; but one of them called out to me in Venetian, 'Why do not you, who relieve others, think of us also?' I turned round and answered her 'Cara, tu sei troppo bella e giovane per aver' bisogna del' soccorso mio.'

She answered, 'If you saw my hut and my food, you would not say so.' All this passed half jestingly, and I saw no more of her for some days. A few evenings after, we met with these two girls again, and they addressed us more seriously, assuring us of the truth of their statement. They were cousins; Margarita married, the other single. As I doubted still of the circumstances, I took the business in a different light, and made an appointment with them for the next evening

*

in short, in a few evenings we arranged our affairs; and for a long space of time she was the only one who preserved over me an ascendancy, which was often disputed, and never impaired.

"The reasons of this were, firstly, her personvery dark, tall, the Venetian face, very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old, She was besides a thorough Venetian in her dialect, in her thoughts, in her countenance, in every thing, with all their naïveté and pantaloon humour. Besides, she could neither read nor write, and could not plague me with letters,-except twice that she paid sixpence to a public scribe, under the piazza, to make a letter for her, upon some occasion when I was ill, and could not see her. In other respects, she was somewhat fierce and 'prepotente,' that is, overbearing, and used to walk in whenever it suited her, with no very great regard to time, place, nor persons; and if she found any women in her way, she knocked them down.

"When I first knew her, I was in 'relazione' (liaison) with la Signora **, who was silly enough one evening at Dolo, accompanied by some of her female friends, to threaten her; for the gossips of the villeggiatura had already found out, by the neighing of my horse one evening, that I used to ride late in the night' to meet the Fornarina. Margarita threw back her veil (fazziolo), and replied in very explicit Venetian : 'You are not his wife: I am not his wife: you are his donna, and I am his donna: your husband is a becco, and mine is another. For the rest, what right have you to reproach me? if he prefers me to you, is it my fault? If you wish to secure him, tie him to your petticoat-string. But do not think to speak to me without a reply, because you happen to be richer than I am.' Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence, she went on her way, leaving a numerous audience, with Madame **, to ponder at her leisure on the dialogue between them.

"When I came to Venice for the winter, she followed; and, as she found herself out to be a favourite, she came to me pretty often. But she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women. At the Cavalchina,' the masked ball on the last night of the Carnival, where all the world goes, she snatched off the mask of Madame Contarini, a lady noble by birth, and decent in conduct, for no other reason but because

เ

she happened to be leaning on my arm. You may suppose what a cursed noise this made; but this is only one of her pranks.

"At last she quarrelled with her husband, and one evening ran away to my house. I told her this would not do: she said she would lie in the street, but not go back to him; that he beat her, (the gentle tigress!) spent her money, and scandalously neglected her. As it was midnight, I let her stay, and next day there was no moving her at all. Her husband came, roaring and crying, and entreating her to come back:-not she! He then applied to the police, and they applied to me: I told them and her husband to take her; I did not want her; she had come, and I could not fling her out of the window; but they might conduct her through that or the door if they chose it. She went before the commissary, but was obliged to return with that becco ettico,' as she called the poor man, who had a phthisic. In a few days she ran away again. After a precious piece of work, she fixed herself in my house, really and truly without my consent; but, owing to my indolence, and not being able to keep my countenance—for if I began in a rage, she always finished by making me laugh with some Venetian pantaloonery or another; and the gipsy knew this well enough, as well as her other powers of persuasion, and exerted them with the usual tact and success of all she-things;-high and low, they are all alike for that. "Madame Benzoni also took her under her protection, and then her head turned. She was always in extremes, either crying or laughing, and so fierce when angered, that she was the terror of men, women, and children-for she had the strength of an Amazon, with the temper of Medea. She was a fine animal, but quite untameable. I was the only person that could at all keep her in any order, and when she saw me really angry (which they tell me is a savage sight), she subsided. But she had a thousand fooleries. In her fazziolo, the dress of the lower orders, she looked beautiful; but, alas! she longed for a hat and feathers; and all I could say or do (and I said much) could not prevent this travestie. I put the first into the fire; but I got tired of burning them before she did of buying them, so that she made herself a figure-for they did not at all become her.

"Then she would have her gowns with a tail-like a lady, forsooth; nothing would serve her but 'l'abita colla coua,' or cua (that is the Venetian for 'la cola,' the tail or train), and as her cursed pronunciation of the word made me laugh, there was an end of all controversy, and she dragged this diabolical tail after her every where

"In the mean time, she beat the women and stopped my letters. I found her one day pondering over one. She used to try to find out by their shape whether they were feminine or no; and she used to lament her ignorance, and actually studied her alphabet, on pur

pose (as she declared) to open all letters addressed to me and read their contents.

"I must not omit to do justice to her housekeeping qualities. After she came into my house as 'donna di governo,' the expenses were reduced to less than half,-the apartments were kept in order, and every thing and every body else, except herself.

"That she had a sufficient regard for me in her wild way, I had many reasons to believe. I will mention one. In the autumn, one day, going to the Lido with my gondoliers, we were overtaken by a heavy squall, and the gondola put in peril-hats blown away, boat filling, oar lost, tumbling sea, thunder, rain in torrents, night coming, and wind unceasing. On our return, after a tight struggle, I found her on the open steps of the Mocenigo palace, on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair, which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows and breast. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and the waves rolling at her feet, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the sibyl of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment except ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me, as might have been expected, but calling out to me-'Ah! can' della Madonna, ne esto il tempo per andar' al' Lido!' (Ah! dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to Lido!) ran into the house, and solaced herself with scolding the boatmen for not foreseeing the temporale.' I am told by the servants that she had only been prevented from coming in a boat to look after me, by the refusal of all the gondoliers of the canal to put out into the harbour in such a moment; and that then she sate down on the steps in all the thickest of the squall, and would neither be removed nor comforted. Her joy at seeing me again was moderately mixed with ferocity, and gave me the idea of a tigress over her recovered cubs. "But her reign drew near a close. She became quite ungovernable some months after, and a concurrence of complaints, some true, and many false-'a favourite has no friends'--determined me to part with her. I told her quietly that she must return home (she had acquired a sufficient provision for herself and mother, etc. in my service), and she refused to quit the house, I was firm, and she went threatening knives and revenge. I told her that I had seen knives drawn before her time, and that if she chose to begin, there was a knife, and fork also, at her service on the table, and that intimidation would not do. The next day, while I was at dinner, she walked in (having broken open a glass door that led from the hall below to the staircase, by way of prologue), and, advancing straight up to the table, snatched the knife from my hand, cutting me slightly in the thumb in the operation. Whed

ther she meant to use this against herself or me, I know not-probably against neither-but Fletcher disarmed her. I then called my boatmen, and desired them to get the gondola ready, and conduct her to her own house again, seeing carefully that she did herself no mischief by the way. She seemed quite quiet, and walked down stairs. I resumed my dinner.

"We heard a great noise, and went out and met them on the stair-case, carrying her up. She had thrown herself into the canal. That she intended to destroy herself, I do not believe: but when we consider the fear women and men who can't swim have of deep or even of shallow water (and the Venetians in particular, though they live on the waves), and that it was also night, and very cold, it shows that she had a devilish spirit of some sort within her. They had got her out without much damage, excepting the salt water she had swallowed, and the wetting she had undergone.

"I foresaw her intention to refix herself, and sent for a surgeon, inquiring how many hours it would require to restore her from her agitation; and he named the time. I then said, 'I give you that time, and more if you require it; but at the expiration of this prescribed period, if she does not leave the house, Iwill.'

"All my people were consternated. They had always been frightened at her, and were now paralysed: they wanted me to apply to the police, to guard myself, etc. etc. like a pack of snivelling servile boobies as they were. I did nothing of the kind, thinking that I might as well end that way as another; besides, I had been used to savage women, and knew their ways. "I had her sent home quietly after her recovery, and never saw her since, except twice at the opera, at a distance amongst the audience. She made many attempts to return, but no more violent ones. And this is the story of Margarita Cogni."

Who would not admire the fierce en rgies and noble beauty of this passionate peasant? But the magnificent Margarita was only one of many who had no more virtue and less magnanimity than herself. It was amidst the license of so wild a life that the first pages of Don Juan were composed.

until that moment, she had never had an idea—from the instantaneous impression which Lord Byron made upon Countess Guiccioli, it is easy to conjecture, the impression being mutual, that it was not long before mutual and not unpleasing confessions were made; and indeed these were made so quickly, that, by the middle of the month in which their acquaintance had begun (April, 1819), their liaison was at that point which, of some liaisons, is the end. At this period the lady was obliged to leave Venice for Ravenna with her husband, and to Ravenna, after some hesitation, Lord Byron followed her.

In August, the Guicciolis left Ravenna for Bologna, and to Bologna Lord Byron removed also. Here the Count left his wife a month afterwards, and on her health, which had been for some time affected, requiring the change, he with the most complaisant readiness permitted her to proceed to Venice with Lord Byron, and, on arriving there, the physicians of the Countess prescribing the open air of the country, she went— still with the consent of her husband—to reside at a villa hired by his Lordship, who "gave up his villa to her, coming to reside there also." I here quote from Madame Guiccioli herself, who has certainly found an expression most peculiarly delicate for her acceptance of such a residence.

The only person, however, having a right to dispute the propriety of the proceeding, viz., the ancient Count himself, showed, at first, no disposition to do so, merely begging Lord Byron to lend him, the Count Guiccioli, 1,000l. at due and legal interest, the Count having only 30,000l. a-year; nor was it until this little accommodation was refused, that his honour became somewhat irritable and uneasy. For the moment, however, disputes were terminated by the Countess returning with her husband to Ravenna. It was not however in the solitudes of this old romantic town, haunted by the memories of the preceding summer, that the young Countess was likely to forget her illustrious admirer. She suffered, and suffered so severely, that the state of her heart affected her health; and at last, at the request of the lady's own relations, and the sanction of the lady's own husband, who had, unknown to the Countess, exacted from Byron a promise that he would not again visit them, the noble Poet, who had determined to depart for England, changed his mind and set out for Ravenna. feelings he thus describes :

His

"I could not summon up resolution enough to leave the country where you are without once more seeing you. On yourself it will depend whether I ever again shall leave you. Of the rest we shall speak when we

meet.

to me.