la patria di Aifieri e di Monti non ha perduto l'antico valore, in tutte essa dovrebbe essere la prima." Italy has great names still Canova, Monti, Ugo Foscolo, Pindemonte, Visconti, Morelli, Cicognara, Albrizzi, Mezzofanti, Mai, Mustoxidi, Aglietti, and Vacca, will secure to the present generation an honourable place in most of the departments of Art, Science, and Belles Lettres; and in some the very highest - Europe - the World - has but one Canova.

It has been somewhere said by Alfieri, that "La pianta uomo nasce più robusta in Italia che in qualunque altra terra e che gli stessi atroci delitti che vi si commettono ne sono una prova." Without subscribing to the latter part of his proposition, a dangerous doctrine, the truth of which may be disputed on better grounds, namely, that the Italians are in no respect more ferocious than their neighbours, that man must be wilfully blind, or ignorantly heedless, who is not struck with the extraordinary capacity of this people, or, if such a word be admissible, their capabilities, the facility of their acquisitions, the rapidity of their conceptions, the fire of their genius, their sense of beauty, and, amidst all the disadvantages of repeated revolutions, the desolation of battles, and the despair of ages, their still unquenched “longing after immortality," 2 - the immortality of independence. And when we our

12

[Antonio Canova, sculptor, 1757-1822; Vincenzo Monti, 1754-1828; Ugo Foscolo, 1776-1827: Ippolito Pindemonte, 1753-1828, poets; Ennius Quirinus Visconti, 1751-1818, the valuer of the Elgin marbles, archæologist; Giacomo Morelli, 1745-1819, bibliographer and scholar (the architect Cosimo Morelli, born 1732, died in 1812); Leopoldo Conte de Cicognara, 1767-1834, archæologist; the Contessa Albrizzi, 17697-1836, authoress of Ritratti di Uomini Illustri; Giuseppe Mezzofanti, 17741849, linguist: Angelo Maï (cardinal), 17821854, philologist; Andreas Moustoxides, 1787 -1860, a Greek archæologist, who wrote in Italian; Francesco Aglietti, 1757-1836; Andrea Vacca Berlinghieri, 1772-1826 (see Life, p. 339).]

[Addison, Cato, act v. sc. 1, lines 1-3"It must be so Plato, thou reason'st well! Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality?"]

era

selves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the labourers' chorus, "Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non è più come prima!" it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge with the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St Jean, and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy, of France, and of the world, by men whose conduct you yourself have exposed in a work worthy of the better days of our history. For me,

"Non movero mai corda

Ove la turba di sue ciance assorda."

What Italy has gained by the late transfer of nations, it were useless for Englishmen to enquire, till it becomes ascertained that England has acquired than something more a permanent army and a suspended Habeas Corpus; it is enough for them to look at home. For what they have done abroad, and especially in the South, "Verily they will have their reward," and at no very distant period.

Wishing you, my dear Hobhouse, a safe and agreeable return to that country whose real welfare can be dearer to none than to yourself, I dedicate to you this poem in its completed state; and repeat once more how truly I am

ear:

of

Sabellicus, describing the appearance Venice, has made use of the above image, which would not be poetical were it not true. “Quo fit ut qui supernè [ex speculâ aliquâ eminentiore] urbem contempletur, turritam telluris imaginem medio Oceano figuratam se putet inspicere.' ("And hence it is that whoso regard the City from above, as from a watch tower or loftier eminence, might fancy that he beheld a towery counterfeit of Mother Earth erected in midmost Ocean.") De Veneta Urbis situ Narratio, lib. i. [Cybele, the "mother of the Goddesses," was represented as wearing a mural crown. Venice with her tiara of proud towers is the earth-goddess Cybele, having "suffered a seachange."]

[The gondoliers used to sing alternate stanzas of the Gerusalemme Liberata, capping each other like the shepherds in Virgil's Bucoles. The rival reciters were sometimes attached to the same gondola; but often the response came from a passing gondolier, a stranger to the singer who challenged the contest.

The Beings of the Mind are not of clay:
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence: that which
Fate

Prohibits to dull life in this our state Of mortal bondage, by these Spirits supplied,

First exiles, then replaces what we hate;

Rogers, in his Italy, laments the silence which
greeted the swan-song of his own gondolier
"He sung,

As in the time when Venice was Herself,
Of Tancred and Erminia. On our oars
We rested; and the verse was verse divine!
We could not err -- Perhaps he was the last -
For none took up the strain, none answer'd him;
And, when he ceased, he left upon my ear
A something like the dying voice of Venice!"

The Gondola (Poems, 1852, ii. 70).] [The Rialto, or Rivo alto, "the middle group of islands between the shore and the mainland," on the left of the Grand Canal, was the site of the original city, and till the sixteenth century its formal and legal designation. Byron uses the word incorrectly for the Ponte di Rialto.] [Pierre is the hero of Otway's Venice Preserved, or The Plot Discovered, first played 1682, and, after twenty revivals, as late as October 27, 1837, when Macready played "Pierre," and Phelps "Jaffier."]

The Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored, Neglected garment of her widowhood! St Mark yet sees his Lion' where he stood

Stand, but in mockery of his withered power,

Over the proud Place where an Emperor sued,3

And monarchs gazed and envied in the hour

When Venice was a Queen with an unequalled dower.

XII.

The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian reigns

An Emperor tramples where an Emperor knelt;

Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains

Clank over sceptred cities; Nations melt

From Power's high pinnacle, when they have felt

The sunshine for a while, and downward go

Like Lauwine loosened from the mountain's belt;

Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo !4 Th' octogenarian chief, Byzantium's conquering foe.

XIII.

Before St Mark still glow his Steeds of brass,

Their gilded collars glittering in the sun;

[The Bucentaur, the state barge in which, on Ascension Day, the Doge of Venice used to wed the Adriatic by dropping a ring into it, "was broken up and rifled by the French in 1797" (note, by Rev. E. C. Owen, Childe Harold, 1807. p. 197).]

[The "Horses of St Mark" which, according to the history or legend, Augustus "conveyed" from Alexandria to Rome, Constantine from Rome to Constantinople, Dandolo, in 1204, from Constantinople to Venice, Napoleon, in 1797, from Venice to Paris, were restored to the Venetians by the Austrians in 1815.]

[The humiliation of Barbarossa at the Church of St Mark took place on Tuesday, July 24, 1177.]

["Oh, for one hour of Dundee!" was the exclamation of a Highland chieftain at the battle of Sheriff-muir, November 13, 1715. Sec, too, Wordsworth's Sonnet, "In the Pass of Killicranky." Works, 1888, p. 201.]

But is not Doria's menace 1 come to pass?

Are they not bridled? Venice, lost and won,

Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,

Sinks, like a sea-weed, unto whence she rose!

Better be whelmed beneath the waves, and shun,

Even in Destruction's depth, her foreign foes,

From whom Submission wrings an infamous repose.

XIV.

In youth She was all glory,

Tyre, Her very by-word sprung from Victory, The "Planter of the Lion,' "2 which through fire

And blood she bore o'er subject Earth and Sea;

Though making many slaves, Herself still free,

And Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite; 3

Witness Troy's rival, Candia! Vouch it, ye

Immortal waves that saw Lepanto's fight! 5

For ye are names no Time nor Tyranny can blight.

[The myth or legend is that, in 1379, the Genoese admiral, Pietro Doria, threatened the Venetians that he would "put a rein on those unbridled horses of yours."l

That is, the Lion of St Mark, the standard of the republic, which is the origin of the word Pantaloon Piantaleone, Pantaleon, Pantaloon.

[The Venetians were nicknamed Pantaloni, not, in the first instance, because they were "planters of the lion," because Venetian commerce followed the Venetian flag, but, on the analogy of Paddy and Sandy, because Venetian children were often christened " "Pantaleone," after St Pantaleon.]

Shakespeare is my authority for the word "Ottomite' for Ottoman. "Which Heaven hath forbid the Ottomites" (see Othello, act ii. sc. 3, line 161).

4 ["On 29th September (1669) Candia, and the island of Candia, passed away from Venice, after a defence which had lasted twenty-five years, and was unmatched for bravery in the annals of the Republic."- Venice, an Historical Sketch, by Horatio F. Brown, 1893, p. 378.]

5[The battle of Lapento (October 7, 1571) lasted five hours. . . . The losses are esti

Thus, Venice! if no stronger claim were thine,

Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot

Thy choral memory of the Bard divine, Thy love of Tasso, should have cut the knot

mated at 8000 Christians and 30,000 Turks. The chief glory of the victory rests with the Venetians." Venice, etc., 1893, p. 368.].

[The dramas of Euripides were so popular throughout all Sicily, that those Athenian prisoners who knew... portions of them, won the affections of their masters. cannot refrain from mentioning this though I fear its trustworthiness inferior to its pathos and interest.". History of Greece, 1869, vii. 186.]

story, is much

Grote's

I

colours caught:

[By the Treaty of Paris, May 3, 1814, Lombardy and Venice, which since the battle of Austerlitz had formed part of the French kingdom of Naples, were once more handed over to Austria.]

Venice Preserved; Mysteries of Udolpho; The Ghost-Seer, or Armenian; The Merchant of Venice; Othello.

[The Mysteries of Udolpho by Mrs Anne Radcliffe, to which Byron was indebted for more than one suggestion, was published in 1794. The scene of Schiller's Der Geisterseher (the Ghost-Seer) is laid at Venice.]