but I got my ride, as usual, after the accident.  They say here it was all owing to St. Antonio of Padua, (serious, I assure you,)—­who does thirteen miracles a day,—­that worse did not come of it.  I have no objection to this being his fourteenth in the four-and-twenty-hours.  He presides over overturns and all escapes therefrom, it seems:  and they dedicate pictures, &c. to him, as the sailors once did to Neptune, after ‘the high Roman fashion.’

     “Yours, in haste.”

[Footnote 69:  There were in this Poem, originally, three lines of remarkable strength and severity, which, as the Italian poet against whom they were directed was then living, were omitted in the publication.  I shall here give them from memory.

    “The prostitution of his Muse and wife,
    Both beautiful, and both by him debased,
    Shall salt his bread and give him means of life.”
]

* * * * *

LETTER 362.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “Ravenna, March 20. 1820.

“Last post I sent you ’The Vision of Dante,’—­four first Cantos.  Enclosed you will find, line for line, in third rhyme (terza rima), of which your British blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of Rimini.  You know that she was born here, and married, and slain, from Gary, Boyd, and such people.  I have done it into cramp English, line for line, and rhyme for rhyme, to try the possibility.  You had best append it to the poems already sent by last three posts.  I shall not allow you to play the tricks you did last year, with the prose you post-scribed to Mazeppa, which I sent to you not to be published, if not in a periodical paper,—­and there you tacked it, without a word of explanation.  If this is published, publish it with the original, and together with the Pulci translation, or the Dante imitation.  I suppose you have both by now, and the Juan long before.

     “FRANCESCA OF RIMINI.

     “Translation from the Inferno of Dante, Canto 5th.

          “’The land where I was born sits by the seas,
          Upon that shore to which the Po descends,
          With all his followers, in search of peace. 
        Love, which the gentle heart soon apprehends,
          Seized him for the fair person which was ta’en
          From me, and me even yet the mode offends. 
        Love, who to none beloved to love again
          Remits, seized me with wish to please, so strong,
          That, as thou seest, yet, yet it doth remain. 
        Love to one death conducted us along,
          But Caina waits for him our life who ended:’ 
          These were the accents utter’d by her tongue,—­
        Since first I listen’d to these souls offended,
          I bow’d my visage and so kept it till—­