is a dreadful drawback in quitting a place, and I can’t stay at Venice much longer.  What I shall do on this point I don’t know.  The girl means to go with me, but I do not like this for her own sake.  I have had so many conflicts in my own mind on this subject, that I am not at all sure they did not help me to the fever I mentioned above.  I am certainly very much attached to her, and I have cause to be so, if you knew all.  But she has a child; and though, like all the ‘children of the sun,’ she consults nothing but passion, it is necessary I should think for both; and it is only the virtuous, like * * * *, who can afford to give up husband and child, and live happy ever after.

“The Italian ethics are the most singular ever met with.  The perversion, not only of action, but of reasoning, is singular in the women.  It is not that they do not consider the thing itself as wrong, and very wrong, but love (the sentiment of love) is not merely an excuse for it, but makes it an actual virtue, provided it is disinterested, and not a caprice, and is confined to one object.  They have awful notions of constancy; for I have seen some ancient figures of eighty pointed out as amorosi of forty, fifty, and sixty years’ standing.  I can’t say I have ever seen a husband and wife so coupled.

     “Ever, &c.

“P.S.  Marianna, to whom I have just translated what I have written on our subject to you, says—­’If you loved me thoroughly, you would not make so many fine reflections, which are only good forbirsi i scarpi,’—­that is, ’to clean shoes withal,’—­a Venetian proverb of appreciation, which is applicable to reasoning of all kinds.”

[Footnote 130:  He had been misinformed on this point,—­the work in question having been, from the first, entitled an “Oriental Romance.”  A much worse mistake (because wilful, and with no very charitable design) was that of certain persons, who would have it that the poem was meant to be epic!—­Even Mr. D’Israeli has, for the sake of a theory, given in to this very gratuitous assumption:—­“The Anacreontic poet,” he says, “remains only Anacreontic in his Epic.”]

[Footnote 131:  In a note to Mr. Murray, subjoined to some corrections for Manfred, he says, “Since I wrote to you last, the slow fever I wot of thought proper to mend its pace, and became similar to one which I caught some years ago in the marshes of Elis, in the Morea.”]

* * * * *

LETTER 268.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Venice, March 25. 1817.