"I don't feel inclined to care further about 'Don Juan.' What do you think a very pretty Italian lady said to me the other day? She had read it in the French, and paid me some compliments, with due DRAWBACKS, upon it. I answered that what she said was true, but that I suspected it would live longer than Childe Harold. '_Ah but_' (said she). '_I would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for three years than an_ IMMORTALITY _of Don Juan!_' The truth is that _it is_ TOO TRUE, and the women hate many things which strip off the tinsel of _sentiment_; and they are right, as it would rob them of their weapons. I never knew a woman who did not hate _De Grammont's Memoirs_ for the same reason: even Lady * * used to abuse them. "Rose's work I never received. It was seized at Venice. Such is the liberality of the Huns, with their two hundred thousand men, that they dare not let such a volume as his circulate." * * * * * LETTER 392. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, 8bre 16 deg., 1820. "The Abbot has just arrived; many thanks; as also for the _Monastery--when you send it!!!_ "The Abbot will have a more than ordinary interest for me, for an ancestor of mine by the mother's side, Sir J. Gordon of Gight, the handsomest of his day, died on a scaffold at Aberdeen for his loyalty to Mary, of whom he was an imputed paramour as well as her relation. His fate was much commented on in the Chronicles of the times. If I mistake not, he had something to do with her escape from Loch Leven, or with her captivity there. But this you will know better than I. "I recollect Loch Leven as it were but yesterday. I saw it in my way to England in 1798, being then ten years of age. My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line from the _old Gordons, not the Seyton Gordons_, as she disdainfully termed the ducal branch, told me the story, always reminding me how superior _her_ Gordons were to the southern Byrons, notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother's Gordons had done in her own person. "I have written to you so often lately, that the brevity of this will be welcome. Yours," &c. * * * * * LETTER 393. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, 8bre 17 deg., 1820. "Enclosed is the Dedication of Marino Faliero to _Goethe_. Query,--is his title _Baron_ or not? I think yes. Let me know your opinion, and so forth. "P.S. Let me know what Mr. Hobhouse and you have decided about the two prose letters and their publication.