"This should have been written fifteen moons ago--the first stanza was. I am just come out from an hour's swim in the Adriatic; and I write to you with a black-eyed Venetian girl before me, reading Boccacio. "Last week I had a row on the road (I came up to Venice from my casino, a few miles on the Paduan road, this blessed day, to bathe) with a fellow in a carriage, who was impudent to my horse. I gave him a swingeing box on the ear, which sent him to the police, who dismissed his complaint. Witnesses had seen the transaction. He first shouted, in an unseemly way, to frighten my palfry. I wheeled round, rode up to the window, and asked him what he meant. He grinned, and said some foolery, which produced him an immediate slap in the face, to his utter discomfiture. Much blasphemy ensued, and some menace, which I stopped by dismounting and opening the carriage door, and intimating an intention of mending the road with his immediate remains, if he did not hold his tongue. He held it. "Monk Lewis is here--'how pleasant!'[5] He is a very good fellow, and very much yours. So is Sam--so is every body--and amongst the number, "Yours ever, "B. "P.S. What think you of Manfred?" [Footnote 5: An allusion (such as often occurs in these letters) to an anecdote with which he had been amused.] * * * * * LETTER 290. TO MR. MURRAY. "La Mira, near Venice, July 15. 1817. "I have finished (that is, written--the file comes afterwards) ninety and eight stanzas of the fourth Canto, which I mean to be the concluding one. It will probably be about the same length as the _third_, being already of the dimensions of the first or second Cantos. I look upon parts of it as very good, that is, if the three former are good, but this we shall see; and at any rate, good or not, it is rather a different style from the last--less metaphysical--which, at any rate, will be a variety. I sent you the shaft of the column as a specimen the other day, _i.e._ the first stanza. So you may be thinking of its arrival towards autumn, whose winds will not be the only ones to be raised, _if so be as how that_ it is ready by that time. "I lent Lewis, who is at Venice, (in or on the Canalaccio, the Grand Canal,) your extracts from Lalla Rookh and Manuel[6], and, out of contradiction, it may be, he likes the last, and is not much taken with the first, of these performances. Of Manuel, I think, with the exception of a few capers, it is as heavy a nightmare as was ever bestrode by indigestion.