mmencement so fertile in remarkable
incidents that in a romance they would appear improbable. She was born
at Constantinople, where her father, Baron H----, was Austrian
ambassador; married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point
of character; excited the vengeance of Buonaparte by a part in some
conspiracy; several times risked her life; and is not yet twenty-five.
She is here on her way to England, to join her husband, being obliged
to leave Trieste, where she was paying a visit to her mother, by the
approach of the French, and embarks soon in a ship of war. Since my
arrival here. I have had scarcely any other companion. I have found
her very pretty, very accomplished, and extremely eccentric.
Buonaparte is even now so incensed against her, that her life would be
in some danger if she were taken prisoner a second time."

The tone in which he addresses this fair heroine in Childe Harold is
(consistently with the above dispassionate account of her) that of the
purest admiration and interest, unwarmed by any more ardent
sentiment:--

"Sweet Florence! could another ever share
This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine:
But, check'd by every tie, I may not dare
To cast a worthless offering at thy shrine,
Nor ask so dear a breast to feel one pang for mine.

"Thus Harold deem'd as on that lady's eye
He look'd, and met its beam without a thought,
Save admiration, glancing harmless by," &c. &c.

In one so imaginative as Lord Byron, who, while he infused so much of
his life into his poetry, mingled also not a little of poetry with his
life, it is difficult, in unravelling the texture of his feelings, to
distinguish at all times between the fanciful and the real. His
description here, for instance, of the unmoved and "loveless heart,"
with which he contemplated even the charms of this attractive person,
is wholly at variance, not only with the anecdote from his "Memoranda"
which I have recalled, but with the statements in many of his
subsequent letters, and, above all, with one of the most graceful of
his lesser poems, purporting to be addressed to this same lady during
a thunder-storm, on his road to Zitza.[125]

Notwithstanding, however, these counter evidences, I am much disposed
to believe that the representation of the state of heart in the
foregoing extract from Childe Harold may be regarded as the true one;
and that the notion of his being in love was but