of a mannerist: bun excelent in broad comeċt, as wel as in the sentimental pathetic Ex has maut me be quendy laugh and cry, necher té vinci s now a very easy matter—at least for a plever vi produs in me. + Thonght of the state of women under the ancen Greeks-convener enough. Persen statt. & rennan of the barbarism of the chivalry and feuca apatincial and unatural. They ought me nom— and be well fed and arched but not mixed in society. Well educated on in religion-bu u read neither poetry mor polis-nothing but books of piers and cookery. Music-drawing-dancing asta inte gardening and ploughing new and then. I have SEEL them mending the roads in Epris vri pooĖ SUCESS. Why not as well as hay-making and miking? • Came home, and read Mixed again and pievel with my mast.ff-gave him his supper. Made another reading to the epigram, but the turn the same. Tinight at the theatre, there being a pris of us firdikt in the last scene of the comery, the audience laughed and asked him for a Constitution. This shows the stene of the public mind here, as wel a te asasinations. It won't do. There must be an unversal republic. — and there ongin to be. - & The crow is lame of a leg-wonder how it happered—some fool trod upon his me. I suppose. The falcon pretty brisk-the cats large and not-the monkeys I have not looked to since the cold weather, as her suñer by being brought up. Borses must be gay-get a ride as soon as weather serves. Denced muggy still-ar Italian winter is a sad thùng, but all the other seasDIS are charming • What is the reason that I have been, all my lifetime, more or less enuave? and that, if any thing, I am rather less so now than I was at twenty, as far as my recollection serves? I do not know how to answer this, but presume that it is constitutional-as weil as the waking in low spirits, which I have invariably done for many years. Temperance and exercise, which I have practised at times, and for a long time together vigorously and violently, made little or no difference. Violent passions did;-when under their immediate influence-it is odd, but-I was in agitated, but not in depressed spirits. A dose of salts has the effect of a temporary inebriation, like light champagne, upon me. But wine and spirits make me sullen and savage to ferocity-silent, however, and retiring, and not quarrelsome, if not spoken to. Swimming also raises my spirits,-but in general they are low, and get daily lower. That is hopeless; for I do not think I am so much ennuyé as I was at nineteen. The proof is, that then I must game, or drink, or be in motion of some kind, or I was miserable. At present, I can mope in quietness; and like being alone better than any company-except the lady's whom I serve. But I feel a something, which makes me think that, if I ever reach near to old age, like Swift, 'I shall die at top' first. Only I do not dread idiotism or madness so much as he did. On the contrary, I think some quieter stages of both must be preferable to much of what men think the possession of their senses. January 7th, 1821, Sunday. « Still rain-mist-snow-drizzle—and all the incalculable combinations of a climate, where heat and cold struggle for mastery. Read Spence, and turned over Roscoe, to find a passage I have not found. Read the 4th vol. of W. Scott's second series of ‘Tales of my Landlord.' Dined. Read the Lugano Gazette. Read -I forget what. At 8 went to conversazione. Found there the Countess Geltrude, Betty V. and her husband, and others. Pretty black-eyed woman that-only twentytwo-same age as Teresa, who is prettier, though. « The Count Pietro G. took me aside to say that the Patriots have had notice from Forli (twenty miles off) that to-night the government and its party mean to strike a stoke—that the Cardinal here has had orders to make several arrests immediately, and that, in consequence, the Liberals are arming, and have posted patroles in the streets, to sound the alarm and give notice to fight for it. « He asked me 'what should be done?"-I answered ' fight for it, rather than be taken in detail;' and offered, if any of them are in immediate apprehension of arrest, to receive them in my house (which is defensible), and to defend them, with my servants and themselves (we have arms and ammunition), as long as we can,—or to try to get them away under cloud of night. On going home, I offered him the pistols which I had about me— but he refused, but said he would come off to me in case of accidents. << It wants half an hour of midnight, and rains ;—as Gibbet says, a fine night for their enterprise-dark as hell, and blows like the devil.' If the row don't happen now, it must soon. I thought that their system of shooting people would soon produce a reaction—and now it seems coming. I will do what I can in the way of combat, though a little out of exercise. The cause is a good one. << Turned over and over half a score of books for the passage in question, and can't find it. Expect to hear the drum and the musquetry momently (for they swear valued, and, as the reader has seen, throwing slight and mockery upon a tie in which it was evident some of the best feelings of his nature were wrapped up. That foe to all enthusiasm and romance, the habit of ridicule, had, in proportion as he exchanged the illusions for the realities of life, gained further empire over him; and how far it had, at this time, encroached upon the loftier and fairer regions of his mind, may be seen in the pages of Don Juan,-that diversified arena, on which the two Genii, good and evil, that governed his thoughts, hold, with alternate triumph, their ever-pow erful combat. Even this, too, this vein of mockery,-in the excess to which, at last, he carried it,--was but another result of the shock his proud mind had received from those events that had cast him off, branded and heartstricken, from country and from home. As he himself touchingly says, And if I laugh at any mortal thing, This laughter, which, in such temperaments, is the near neighbour of tears,-served as a diversion to him from more painful vents of bitterness; and the same philosophical calculation which made the poet of melancholy, Young, declare, that « he preferred laughing at the world to being angry with it," led Lord Byron also to settle upon the same conclusion; and to feel, in the misanthropic views he was inclined to take of mankind, that mirth often saved him the pain of hate. That, with so many drawbacks upon all generous effusions of sentiment, he should still have preserved so much of his native tenderness and ardour as is conspicuous, through all disguises, in his unquestionable love for Madame Guiccioli, and in the still more undoubted zeal with which he now entered, heart and soul, into the great cause of human freedom, wheresoever, or by whomsoever, asserted,1-only shows how rich must have been the original stores of sensibility and enthusiasm which even a career such as his could so little chill or exhaust. Most consoling, too, is it to reflect that the few latter years of his life should have been thus visited with a return of that poetic lustre, which, though it never had ceased to surround the bard, had but too much faded away from the character of the man; and that while Love,-reprehensible as it was, but still Love, -had the credit of rescuing him from the only errors that disgraced his maturer years, for Liberty was reserved the proud, but mournful triumph of calling the last stage of his glorious course her own, and lighting him, amidst the sympathies of the world, to his grave. Having endeavoured, in this comparison between his present and former self, to account, by what I consider to be their true causes, for the new phenomena which his character, at this period, exhibited, I shall Among his Detached Thoughts» I find this general passion for liberty thus strikingly expressed. After saying, in reference to his own choice of Venice as a place of residence, «I remembered General Ludlow's domal inscription, 'Omne solum forti patria,' and sate down free in a country which had been one of slavery for centuries,» he adds, « But there is no freedom, even for masters, in the midst of slaves. It makes my blood boil to see the thing. I sometimes wish that I was the owner of Africa, to do at once what Wilberforce will do in time, viz., sweep slavery from her deserts, and look on upon the first dance of their freedom. As to political slavery, so general, it is men's own fault: if they will be slaves, let them! Yet it is but a 'word and a blow.' See how England formerly, France, Spain, Portugal, America, Switzerland, freed themselves! There is no one instance of a long contest in which men did not triumph over systems. If Tyranny misses her first spring, she is cowardly as the tiger, and retires to be hunted. >> |