to see any physician, I recovered.  It is an epidemic of the place, which is annual, and visits strangers.  Here follow some versicles, which I made one sleepless night.

“I read the ‘Christabel;’
Very well: 
I read the ‘Missionary;’
Pretty—­very: 
I tried at ‘Ilderim;’
Ahem;
I read a sheet of ‘Marg’ret of Anjou;’
Can you? 
I turn’d a page of * ’s ‘Waterloo;’
Pooh! pooh! 
I look’d at Wordsworth’s milk-white ‘Rylstone Doe:’ 
Hillo!
&c. &c. &c.

“I have not the least idea where I am going, nor what I am to do.  I wished to have gone to Rome; but at present it is pestilent with English,—­a parcel of staring boobies, who go about gaping and wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent.  A man is a fool who travels now in France or Italy, till this tribe of wretches is swept home again.  In two or three years the first rush will be over, and the Continent will be roomy and agreeable.

“I stayed at Venice chiefly because it is not one of their ’dens of thieves;’ and here they but pause and pass.  In Switzerland it was really noxious.  Luckily, I was early, and had got the prettiest place on all the Lake before they were quickened into motion with the rest of the reptiles.  But they crossed me every where.  I met a family of children and old women half-way up the Wengen Alp (by the Jungfrau) upon mules, some of them too old and others too young to be the least aware of what they saw.

“By the way, I think the Jungfrau, and all that region of Alps, which I traversed in September—­going to the very top of the Wengen, which is not the highest (the Jungfrau itself is inaccessible) but the best point of view—­much finer than Mont-Blanc and Chamouni, or the Simplon I kept a journal of the whole for my sister Augusta, part of which she copied and let Murray see.

“I wrote a sort of mad Drama, for the sake of introducing the Alpine scenery in description:  and this I sent lately to Murray.  Almost all the dram. pers. are spirits, ghosts, or magicians, and the scene is in the Alps and the other world, so you may suppose what a Bedlam tragedy it must be:  make him show it you.  I sent him all three acts piece-meal, by the post, and suppose they have arrived.

“I have now written to you at least six letters, or lettered, and all I have received in return is a note about the length you used to write from Bury Street to St. James’s Street, when we used to dine with Rogers, and talk laxly, and go to parties, and hear poor Sheridan now and then.  Do you remember one night he was so tipsy that I was forced to put his cocked hat on for him,—­for he could not,—­and I let him down at Brookes’s, much as he must since have been let down into his grave.  Heigh ho!  I wish I was drunk—­but I have nothing but this d——­d barley-water before me.

“I am still in love,—­which