"dinner, and snatching a knife from the table, "offered to stab herself if I did not consent to "her stay. Seeing I took no notice of her "threat, as knowing it to be only a feint, she "ran into the balcony and threw herself into "the canal. As it was only knee-deep and there "were plenty of gondolas, one of them picked

her up. This affair made a great noise at the "time. Some said that I had thrown her into "the water, others that she had drowned herself for love; but this is the real story.

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'

"I got into nearly as great a scrape by making my court to a spinster. As many

Dowagers as you please at Venice, but beware "of flirting with Raggazzas. I had been one "night under her window serenading, and the "next morning who should be announced at the

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same time but a priest and a police-officer,

come, as I thought, either to shoot or marry

me again, I did not care which. I was dis

gusted and tired with the life I led at Venice,

" and was glad to turn my back on it. The "Austrian Government, too, partly contributed "to drive me away. They intercepted my books "and papers, opened my letters, and proscribed

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my works. I was not sorry for this last arbi

trary act, as a very bad translation of Childe "Harold' had just appeared, which I was not "at all pleased with. I did not like my old "friend in his new loose dress; it was a desha"bille that did not at all become him, those "sciolti versi that they put him into."

It is difficult to judge, from the contradictory" nature of his writings, what the religious opinions of Lord Byron really were. Perhaps the conversations I held with him may throw some light upon a subject that cannot fail to excite curiosity. On the whole, I am inclined to think that if he were occasionally sceptical, and thought it, as he says,

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A pleasant voyage, perhaps, to float,

Like Pyrrho, on a sea of speculation,”*

yet his wavering never amounted to a disbelief in the divine Founder of Christianity.

"I always took great delight," observed he, "in the English Cathedral service. It cannot "fail to inspire every man, who feels at all, with "devotion. Notwithstanding which, Christi"anity is not the best source of inspiration for

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a poet. No poet should be tied down to a

"direct profession of faith. Metaphysics open

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a vast field; Nature, and anti-Mosaical specu

"lations on the origin of the world, a wide

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range, and sources of poetry that are shut out by Christianity."

I advanced Tasso and Milton.

* Don Juan, Canto IX. Stanza 18.

"Tasso and Milton," replied he, "wrote on "Christian subjects, it is true; but how did

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they treat them? The Jerusalem Delivered' "deals little in Christian doctrines, and the "Paradise Lost' makes use of the heathen my

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1

thology, which is surely scarcely allowable. "Milton discarded papacy, and adopted no "creed in its room; he never attended divine worship.

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"His great epics, that nobody reads, prove nothing. He took his text from the Old and "New Testaments. He shocks these vere ap ap"prehensions of the Catholics, as he did those "of the 'divines of his day, by too great a fa

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miliarity with Heaven, and the introduction "of the Divinity himself; and, more than all, "by making the Devil his herò, and deifying "the dæmons.

"He certainly excites compassion for Satan, "and endeavours to make him out an injured

'personage-he gives him human passions too, "makes him pity Adam and Eve, and justify "himself much as Prometheus does. Yet Mil66 ton was never blamed for all this. I should "be very curious to know what his real belief

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was. The Paradise Lost' and Regained' "do not satisfy me on this point. One might "as well say that Moore is a fire-worshipper, "or a follower of Mokanna, because he chose "those subjects from the East; or that I am "a Cainist.”

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Another time he said:

A

"One mode of worship yields to another; no religion has lasted more than two thousand

years. Out of the eight hundred millions "that the globe contains, only two hundred "millions are Christians. Query,What is

*A religious work of Milton's has since been discovered,

and will throw light on this interesting subject.