"P.S. Can you forgive this? It is only a reply to your lines against my Italians. Of course I will _stand_ by my lines against all men; but it is heart-breaking to see such things in a people as the reception of that unredeemed * * * * * * in an oppressed country. _Your_ apotheosis is now reduced to a level with his welcome, and their gratitude to Grattan is cancelled by their atrocious adulation of this, &c. &c. &c." [Footnote 52: "The Irish Avatar." In this copy the following sentence (taken from a letter of Curran, in the able Life of that true Irishman, by his son) is prefixed as a motto to the Poem,--"And Ireland, like a bastinadoed elephant, kneeling to receive the paltry rider."--_Letter of Curran, Life_, vol. ii. p. 336. At the end of the verses are these words:--"(Signed) W.L. B * *, M.A., and written with a view to a Bishoprick."] * * * * * LETTER 453. TO MR. MOORE. "Ravenna, September 19, 1821. "I am in all the sweat, dust, and blasphemy of an universal packing of all my things, furniture, &c. for Pisa, whither I go for the winter. The cause has been the exile of all my fellow Carbonics, and, amongst them, of the whole family of Madame G.; who, you know, was divorced from her husband last week, 'on account of P.P. clerk of this parish,' and who is obliged to join her father and relatives, now in exile there, to avoid being shut up in a monastery, because the Pope's decree of separation required her to reside in _casa paterna_, or else, for decorum's sake, in a convent. As I could not say with Hamlet, 'Get thee to a nunnery,' I am preparing to follow them. "It is awful work, this love, and prevents all a man's projects of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as every thing seems up here) with her brother, who is a very fine, brave fellow (I have seen him put to the proof), and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one's own heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge them. "We were divided in choice between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visiters; for which reason, after writing for some information about houses, upon hearing that there was a colony of English all over the cantons of Geneva, &c. I immediately gave up the thought, and persuaded the Gambas to do the same.