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"I got into nearly as great a scrape by making my court to a spinster. As many Dowagers as you please at Venice, but beware of flirting with Raggazzas. I had been one night under her window serenading, and the next morning who should be announced at the same time but a priest and a policeofficer, come, as I thought, either to shoot or marry me again, I did not care which. I was disgusted and tired with the life I led at Venice, and was glad to turn my back on it. The Austrian Government, too, partly contributed to drive me away. They intercepted my books and papers, opened my letters, and proscribed my works. I was not sorry for this last arbitrary act, as a very bad translation of Childe Harold' had just appeared, which I was not at all pleased with. I did not like my old friend in his new loose dress ; it was a dishabille that did not at all become him, those sciolti versi that they put him into."

It is difficult to judge, from the contradictory nature of his writings, what the religious opinions of Lord Byron really were. Perhaps the conversations I held with him may throw some light upon a subject that cannot fail to excite curiosity. On the whole, I am inclined to think that if he were occasionally sceptical, and thought it, as he says,

"A pleasant voyage, perhaps, to float,
"Like Pyrrho on a sea of speculation,"
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* Don Juan, Canto IX. Stanza 18.

yet his wavering never amounted to a disbelief in the Divine Founder of Christianity.

"I always took great delight," observed he, "in the English Cathedral service. It cannot fail to inspire every man, who feels at all, with devotion. Notwithstanding which, Christianity is not the best source of inspiration for a poet. No poet should be tied down to a direct profession of faith. Metaphysics open a vast field; Nature and anti-Mosaical speculations on the origin of the world, a wide range, and sources of poetry that are shut out by Christianity."

I advanced Tasso and Milton.

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"Tasso and Milton," replied he, "wrote on Christian subjects, it is true; but how did they treat them? The Jerusalem Delivered' deals little in Christian doctrines, and the Paradise Lost' makes use of the heathen mythology, which is surely scarcely allowable. Milton discarded papacy, and adopted no creed in its room; he never attended divine worship.

"His great epics, that nobody reads, prove nothing. He took his text from the Old and New Testaments. He shocks the severe apprehensions of the Catholics, as he did those of the Divines of his day, by too great a familiarity with Heaven, and the introduction of the Divinity himself; and, more than all, by making the Devil his hero, and deifying the dæmons.

"He certainly excites compassion for Satan, and endeavours to make him out an injured personagehe gives him human passions, too, makes him pity

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Adam and Eve, and justify himself much as Prometheus does. Yet Milton was never blamed for all this. I should be very curious to know what his real belief was.* The Paradise Lost' and Regained' do hot satisfy me on this point. One might as well say that Moore is a fire-worshipper, or a follower of Mokanna, because he chose those subjects from the East; or that I am a Cainist."

Another time he said:

"One mode of worship yields to another; no religion has lasted more than two thousand years. Out of the eight hundred millions that the globe contains, only two hundred millions are Christians. Query,— What is to become of the six hundred millions that do not believe, and of those incalculable millions that lived before Christ?

"People at home are mad about Missionary Societies, and missions to the East. I have been applied to, to subscribe, several times since, and once before I left England. The Catholic priests have been labouring hard for nearly a century; but what have they done? Out of eighty millions of Hindoos, how many proselytes have been made? Sir J. Malcolm said at Murray's, before several persons, that the Padres, as he called them, had only made six converts at Bombay during his time, and that even this black little flock forsook their shepherds when the rum was out,

*A religious work of Milton's has since been discovered, and will throw light on this interesting subject.

Their faith evaporated with the fumes of the arrack. Besides, the Hindoos believe that they have had nine incarnations: the Missionaries preach that a people whom the Indians only know to despise, have had one. It is nine to one against them, by their own showing.

"Another doctrine can never be in repute among the Solomons of the East. It cannot be easy to persuade men who have had as many wives as they pleased, to be content with one; besides, a woman is old at twenty in that country. What are men to do? They are not all St. Anthonies.-I will tell you a story. A certain Signior Antonio of my acquaintance married a very little round fat wife, very fond of waltzing, who went by the name of the Tentazione di Sant' Antonio. There is a picture, a celebrated one, in which a little woman not unresembling my description plays the principal rôle, and is most troublesome to the Saint, most trying to his virtue. Very few of the modern saints will have his forbearance, though they may imitate him in his martyrdom.

"I have been reading," said he one day, "Tacitus' account of the siege of Jerusalem, under Titus. What a sovereign contempt the Romans had for the Jews! Their country seems to have been little better than themselves.

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Priestley denied the original sin, and that any would be damned. Wesley, the object of Southey's panegyric, preached the doctrines of election and faith, and, like all the sectarians, does not want texts to prove both.

"The best Christians can never be satisfied of their own salvation. Dr. Johnson died like a coward, and Cowper was near shooting himself; Hume went off the stage like a brave man, and Voltaire's last moments do not seem to have been clouded by any fears of what was to come. A man may study any thing till he believes in it. Creech died a Lucretian, Burkhardt and Browne were Mahommedans. Sale, the translator of the Koran, was suspected of being an Islamite, but a very different one from you, Shi- loh,* (as he sometimes used to call Shelley.)

"You are a Protestant-you protest against all religions. There is T will traduce Dante till he becomes a Dantist. I am called a Manichæan; I may rather be called an Any-chæan, or an Anything. arian. How do you like my sect? The sect of Any、 thing-arians sounds well, does it not?"

Calling on him the next day, we found him, as was Sometimes the case, silent, dull, and sombre, At length he said:

"Here is a little book somebody has sent me about Christianity, that has made me very uncomfortable; the reasoning seems to me very strong, the proofs are very staggering. I don't think you can answer it, Shelley; at least I am sure I can't, and what is more, I don't wish it."

Speaking of Gibbon he said :

Alluding to the 'Revolt of Islam,'

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