find no other word
to express the concentred and impatient feelings which consume him; but
it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for
in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and
unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more
serious conversation is a sort of intoxication. He has travelled much;
and there is an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in
different countries."]

* * * * *

It was at this time, as we shall see by the letters I am about to
produce, and as the features, indeed, of the progeny itself would but
too plainly indicate, that he conceived, and wrote some part of, his
poem of 'Don Juan;'--and never did pages more faithfully and, in many
respects, lamentably, reflect every variety of feeling, and whim, and
passion that, like the wrack of autumn, swept across the author's mind
in writing them. Nothing less, indeed, than that singular combination of
attributes, which existed and were in full activity in his mind at this
moment, could have suggested, or been capable of, the execution of such
a work. The cool shrewdness of age, with the vivacity and glowing
temperament of youth,--the wit of a Voltaire, with the sensibility of a
Rousseau,--the minute, practical knowledge of the man of society, with
the abstract and self-contemplative spirit of the poet,--a
susceptibility of all that is grandest and most affecting in human
virtue, with a deep, withering experience of all that is most fatal to
it,--the two extremes, in short, of man's mixed and inconsistent nature,
now rankly smelling of earth, now breathing of heaven,--such was the
strange assemblage of contrary elements, all meeting together in the
same mind, and all brought to bear, in turn, upon the same task, from
which alone could have sprung this extraordinary poem,--the most
powerful and, in many respects, painful display of the versatility of
genius that has ever been left for succeeding ages to wonder at and
deplore.

I shall now proceed with his correspondence,--having thought some of the
preceding observations necessary, not only to explain to the reader much
of what he will find in these letters, but to account to him for much
that has been necessarily omitted.

* * * * *

LETTER 318. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Venice, June 18. 1818.

"Business and the utter and inexplicable silence of all my