_Life and Correspondence_.]

Again passing through Ferrara, and visiting Bologna, he left the latter on
the 8th, and on his arrival at his destination found the Countess
dangerously ill; but his presence, and the attentions of the famous
Venetian doctor, Aglietti, who was sent for by his advice, restored her.
The Count seems to have been proud of his guest. "I can't make him out at
all," Byron writes; "he visits me frequently, and takes me out (like
Whittington the Lord Mayor) in a coach and six horses. The fact appears to
be, that he is completely governed by her--and, for that matter, so am I."
Later he speaks of having got his horses from Venice, and riding or
driving daily in the scenery reproduced in the third canto of _Don
Juan_:--

Sweet hour of twilight! in the solitude
Of the pine forest, and the silent shore
Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood.

On Theresa's recovery, in dread of a possible separation he proposed to
fly with her to America, to the Alps, to "some unsuspected isle in the far
seas;" and she suggested the idea of feigning death, like Juliet, and
rising from the tomb. Neither expedient was called for. When the Count
went to Bologna, in August, with his wife, Lord Byron was allowed to
follow; and--after consoling himself during an excursion which the married
pair made to their estate, by hovering about her empty rooms and writing
in her books--he established himself, on the Count's return to his
headquarters, with her and Allegra at Bologna. Meanwhile, Byron had
written _The Prophecy of Dante_, and in August the prose letter, _To the
Editor of the British Review_, on the charge of bribery in _Don Juan_.
Than this inimitable epistle no more laughter-compelling composition
exists. About the same time, we hear of his leaving the theatre in a
convulsion of tears, occasioned by the representation of Alfieri's
_Mirra_.

He left Bologna with the Countess on the 15th of September, when they
visited the Euganean hills and Arqua, and wrote their names together in
the Pilgrim's Book. On arriving at Venice, the physicians recommending
Madame Guiccioli to country air, they settled, still by her husband's
consent, for the autumn at La Mira, where Moore and others found them
domesticated. At the beginning of November the poet was prostrated by an
attack of tertian fever. In some of his hours of delirium he dictated to
his careful nurses, Fletcher and the Countess, a number of verses, which
she ass