“Venice, April 2. 1817.

     “I sent you the whole of the Drama at three several times, act by
     act, in separate covers.  I hope that you have, or will receive,
     some or the whole of it.

“So Love has a conscience.  By Diana!  I shall make him take back the box, though it were Pandora’s.  The discovery of its intrinsic silver occurred on sending it to have the lid adapted to admit Marianna’s portrait.  Of course I had the box remitted in statu quo, and had the picture set in another, which suits it (the picture) very well.  The defaulting box is not touched, hardly, and was not in the man’s hands above an hour.

“I am aware of what you say of Otway; and am a very great admirer of his,—­all except of that maudlin b—­h of chaste lewdness and blubbering curiosity, Belvidera, whom I utterly despise, abhor, and detest.  But the story of Marino Faliero is different, and, I think, so much finer, that I wish Otway had taken it instead:  the head conspiring against the body for refusal of redress for a real injury,—­jealousy—­treason, with the more fixed and inveterate passions (mixed with policy) of an old or elderly man—­the devil himself could not have a finer subject, and he is your only tragic dramatist.

“There is still, in the Doge’s palace, the black veil painted over Faliero’s picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned Doge, and subsequently decapitated.  This was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice—­more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller’s ‘Armenian,’ a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy.  It is also called the ‘Ghost Seer,’ and I never walked down St. Mark’s by moonlight without thinking of it, and ’at nine o’clock he died!’—­But I hate things all fiction; and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great associations to me:  but Pierre has.  There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

“Maturin’s tragedy.—­By your account of him last year to me, he seemed a bit of a coxcomb, personally.  Poor fellow! to be sure, he had had a long seasoning of adversity, which is not so hard to bear as t’other thing.  I hope that this won’t throw him back into the ‘slough of Despond.’

     “You talk of ’marriage;’—­ever since my own funeral, the word makes
     me giddy, and throws me into a cold sweat.  Pray, don’t repeat it.

“You should close with Madame de Stael.  This will be her best work, and permanently historical; it is on her father, the Revolution, and Buonaparte, &c.  Bunstetten told me in Switzerland it was very great.  I have not seen it myself, but the author often.  She was very kind to me at Copet.

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