d grieve,
What mortal would not play the devil?"[1]

[Footnote 1: The Genoese wits had already applied this threadbare
jest to himself. Taking it into their heads that this villa (which
was also, I believe, a Casa Saluzzo) had been the one fixed on for
his own residence, they said "Il Diavolo e ancora entrato in
Paradise."]

Another copy of verses addressed by him to the same lady, whose
beauty and talent might well have claimed a warmer tribute from such
a pen, is yet too interesting, as descriptive of the premature
feeling of age now stealing upon him, to be omitted in these pages.

"TO THE COUNTESS OF B----.

1.

"You have ask'd for a verse:--the request
In a rhymer 'twere strange to deny,
But my Hippocrene was but my breast,
And my feelings (its fountain) are dry.

2.

"Were I now as I was, I had sung
What Lawrence has painted so well;
But the strain would expire on my tongue,
And the theme is too soft for my shell.

3.

"I am ashes where once I was fire,
And the bard in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I _now_ merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.

4.

"My life is not dated by years--
There are _moments_ which act as a plough,
And there is not a furrow appears
But is deep in my soul as my brow.

5.

"Let the young and the brilliant aspire
To sing what I gaze on in vain;
For sorrow has torn from my lyre
The string which was worthy the strain.

"B."

The following letters written during the stay of this party at Genoa
will be found,--some of them at least,--not a little curious.

LETTER 512. TO THE EARL OF B----.

"April 5. 1823.

"My dear Lord,

"How is your gout? or rather, how are you? I return the Count ----'s
Journal, which is a very extraordinary production[1], and of a most
melancholy truth in all that regards high life in England. I know, or
knew personally, most of the personages and societies which he
describes; and after reading his remarks, have the sensation fresh
upon me as if I had seen them yesterday. I would however plead in
behalf of some few exceptions, which I will mention by and by. The
most singular thing is, _how_ he should have penetrated _not_ the
_fact_, but the _mystery_ of the English ennui, at two-and-twenty. I
was about the same age when I made the same discovery, in almost
precisely the same circles,--(for there is scarcely a person
mentioned whom I did not see nightly or daily