these two words, and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of
pickling and bringing me home to Clod, or Blunderbuss Hall. I am sure my
bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of
that country." Hunt's view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer
the truth than Moore's; for with all Byron's insight into Italian vice, he
hated more the master vice of England--hypocrisy; and much of his
greatest, and in a sense latest, because unfinished work, is the severest,
as it might be the wholesomest, satire ever directed against a great
nation since the days of Juvenal and Tacitus.

In September (1817) Byron entered into negotiations, afterwards completed,
for renting a country house among the Euganean hills near Este, from Mr.
Hoppner, the English Consul at Venice, who bears frequent testimony to his
kindness and courtesy. In October we find him settled for the winter in
Venice, where he first occupied his old quarters, in the Spezieria, and
afterwards hired one of the palaces of the Countess Mocenigo on the Grand
Canal. Between this mansion, the cottage at Este, and the villa of La
Mira, he divided his time for the next two years. During the earlier part
of his Venetian career he had continued to frequent the salon of the
Countess Albrizzi, where he met with people of both sexes of some rank and
standing who appreciated his genius, though some among them fell into
absurd mistakes. A gentleman of the company informing the hostess, in
answer to some inquiry regarding Canova's busts, that Washington, the
American President, was shot in a duel by Burke, "What, in the name of
folly, are you thinking of?" said Byron, perceiving that the speaker was
confounding Washington with Hamilton, and Burke with Burr. He afterwards
transferred himself to the rival coterie of the Countess Benzoni, and gave
himself up with little reserve to the intrigues which cast discredit on
this portion of his life. Nothing is so conducive to dissipation as
despair, and Byron had begun to regard the Sea-Cybele as a Sea-Sodom--when
he wrote, "To watch a city die daily, as she does, is a sad contemplation.
I sought to distract my mind from a sense of her desolation and my own
solitude, by plunging into a vortex that was anything but pleasure." In
any case, he forsook the "Dame," and, by what his biographer calls a
"descent in the scale of refinement, for which nothing but the wayward
state of his mind can account," s