t they shall not.

"You ask about my health: about the beginning of the year I was in
a state of great exhaustion, attended by such debility of stomach
that nothing remained upon it; and I was obliged to reform my 'way
of life,' which was conducting me from the 'yellow leaf' to the
ground, with all deliberate speed. I am better in health and
morals, and very much yours, &c.

"P.S. I have read Hodgson's 'Friends.' He is right in defending
Pope against the bastard pelicans of the poetical winter day, who
add insult to their parricide, by sucking the blood of the parent
of English _real_ poetry,--poetry without fault,--and then spurning
the bosom which fed them."

* * * * *

It was about the time when the foregoing letter was written, and when,
as we perceive, like the first return of reason after intoxication, a
full consciousness of some of the evils of his late libertine course of
life had broken upon him, that an attachment differing altogether, both
in duration and devotion, from any of those that, since the dream of his
boyhood, had inspired him, gained an influence over his mind which
lasted through his few remaining years; and, undeniably wrong and
immoral (even allowing for the Italian estimate of such frailties) as
was the nature of the connection to which this attachment led, we can
hardly perhaps,--taking into account the far worse wrong from which it
rescued and preserved him,--consider it otherwise than as an event
fortunate both for his reputation and happiness.

The fair object of this last, and (with one signal exception) only
_real_ love of his whole life, was a young Romagnese lady, the daughter
of Count Gamba, of Ravenna, and married, but a short time before Lord
Byron first met with her, to an old and wealthy widower, of the same
city, Count Guiccioli. Her husband had in early life been the friend of
Alfieri, and had distinguished himself by his zeal in promoting the
establishment of a National Theatre, in which the talents of Alfieri and
his own wealth were to be combined. Notwithstanding his age, and a
character, as it appears, by no means reputable, his great opulence
rendered him an object of ambition among the mothers of Ravenna, who,
according to the too frequent maternal practice, were seen vying with
each other in attracting so rich a purchaser for their daughters, and
the young Teresa Gamba, not yet sixt