in the Venice papers, one a Review of Glenarvon * * * *, and the other a Review of Childe Harold, in which it proclaims me the most rebellious and contumacious admirer of Buonaparte now surviving in Europe.  Both these articles are translations from the Literary Gazette of German Jena.

     “Tell me that Walter Scott is better.  I would not have him ill for
     the world.  I suppose it was by sympathy that I had my fever at the
     same time.

“I joy in the success of your Quarterly, but I must still stick by the Edinburgh; Jeffrey has done so by me, I must say, through every thing, and this is more than I deserved from him.  I have more than once acknowledged to you by letter the ‘Article’ (and articles); say that you have received the said letters, as I do not otherwise know what letters arrive.  Both Reviews came, but nothing more.  M.’s play and the extract not yet come.

     “Write to say whether my Magician has arrived, with all his scenes,
     spells, &c.  Yours ever, &c.

     “It is useless to send to the Foreign Office:  nothing arrives to
     me by that conveyance.  I suppose some zealous clerk thinks it a
     Tory duty to prevent it.”

* * * * *

LETTER 271.  TO MR. ROGERS.

     “Venice, April 4. 1817.

“It is a considerable time since I wrote to you last, and I hardly know why I should trouble you now, except that I think you will not be sorry to hear from me now and then.  You and I were never correspondents, but always something better, which is, very good friends.

“I saw your friend Sharp in Switzerland, or rather in the German territory (which is and is not Switzerland), and he gave Hobhouse and me a very good route for the Bernese Alps; however we took another from a German, and went by Clarens, the Dent de Jamen to Montbovon, and through Simmenthal to Thoun, and so on to Lauterbrounn; except that from thence to the Grindelwald, instead of round about, we went right over the Wengen Alps’ very summit, and being close under the Jungfrau, saw it, its glaciers, and heard the avalanches in all their glory, having famous weather there_for_.  We of course went from the Grindelwald over the Sheidech to Brientz and its lake; past the Reichenbach and all that mountain road, which reminded me of Albania and AEtolia and Greece, except that the people here were more civilised and rascally.  I do not think so very much of Chamouni (except the source of the Arveron, to which we went up to the teeth of the ice, so as to look into and touch the cavity, against the warning of the guides, only one of whom would go with us so close,) as of the Jungfrau, and the Pissevache, and Simplon, which are quite out of all mortal competition.

“I was at Milan about a moon, and saw Monti and some other living curiosities,