“Tell Mr. Hobhouse that I wrote to him a few days ago from Ferrara. It will therefore be idle in him or you to wait for any further answers or returns of proofs from Venice, as I have directed that no English letters be sent after me. The publication can be proceeded in without, and I am already sick of your remarks, to which I think not the least attention ought to be paid.
“Tell Mr. Hobhouse that, since I wrote to him, I had availed myself of my Ferrara letters, and found the society much younger and better there than at Venice. I am very much pleased with the little the shortness of my stay permitted me to see of the Gonfaloniere Count Mosti, and his family and friends in general.
| 218 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1819. |
“I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded one of the grave-digger in Hamlet. He has a collection of capuchins’ skulls, labelled on the forehead, and taking down one of them, said, ‘This was Brother Desiderio Berro, who died at forty—one of my best friends. I begged his head of his brethren after his decease, and they gave it me. I put it in lime and then boiled it. Here it is, teeth and all, in excellent preservation. He was the merriest, cleverest fellow I ever knew. Wherever he went, he brought joy; and whenever any one was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make him cheerful again. He walked so actively, you might have taken him for a dancer—he joked—he laughed—oh! he was such a Frate as I never saw before, nor ever shall again!’
“He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons. In showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of twenty, with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess Barlorini, dead two centuries ago: he said that, on opening her grave, they had found her hair complete, and ‘as yellow as gold.’ Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna; for instance—
‘Martini Luigi
Implora pace;’ |
‘Lucrezia Picini
Implora eterna quiete.’ |
| A. D. 1819. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 219 |
“So, as Shakspeare says of Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, who died at Venice (see Richard 2d), that he, after fighting
|
‘Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens,
And toil’d with works of war, retired himself
To Italy, and there, at Venice, gave
His body to that pleasant country’s earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.’
|
“Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr. Hobbouse’s, sheets of Juan. Don’t wait for further answers from me, but address yours to Venice, as usual. I know nothing of my own movements; I may return there in a few days, or not for some time. All this depends on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well. My daughter Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty; her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will make, in that case, a manageable young lady.
“I have never heard any thing of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenæ.
* * *
*. But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see it. I have
at least seen * * * shivered, who was
one of my assassins. When that man was doing his worst to uproot my whole family, tree,
branch, and blossoms—when, after taking my
220 NOTICES OF THE A. D. 1819. retainer, he went over to them—when he was bringing
desolation on my hearth, and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less
than three years, a natural event—a severe, domestic, but an expected and common
calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of
Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feelings
must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were
to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was declining,
my fortune embarrassed, and my mind had been shaken by many kinds of
disappointment—while I was yet young, and might have reformed what might be wrong in my
conduct, and retrieved what was perplexing in my affairs! But he is in his grave, and *
* * *. What a long letter I have scribbled!
“P.S. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the graves at Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can imagine.”
