"By the last two or three posts I have written to you at length. My _ague_ bows to me every two or three days, but we are not as yet upon intimate speaking terms. I have an intermittent generally every two years, when the climate is favourable (as it is here), but it does me no harm. What I find worse, and cannot get rid of, is the growing depression of my spirits, without sufficient cause. I ride--I am not intemperate in eating or drinking--and my general health is as usual, except a slight ague, which rather does good than not. It must be constitutional; for I know nothing more than usual to depress me to that degree. "How do _you_ manage? I think you told me, at Venice, that your spirits did not keep up without a little claret. I _can_ drink, and bear a good deal of wine (as you may recollect in England); but it don't exhilarate--it makes me savage and suspicious, and even quarrelsome. Laudanum has a similar effect; but I can take much of _it_ without any effect at all. The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a close of _salts_--I mean in the afternoon, after their effect.[58] But one can't take _them_ like champagne. "Excuse this old woman's letter; but my _lemancholy_ don't depend upon health, for it is just the same, well or ill, or here or there. "Yours," &c. [Footnote 58: It was, no doubt, from a similar experience of its effects that Dryden always took physic when about to write any thing of importance. His caricature, Bayes, is accordingly made to say, "When I have a grand design, I ever take physic and let blood; for, when you would have pure swiftness of thought and fiery flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part;--in short," &c. &c. On this subject of the effects of medicine upon the mind and spirits, some curious facts and illustrations have been, with his usual research, collected by Mr. D'Israeli, in his amusing "Curiosities of Literature."] * * * * * LETTER 462. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, October 9. 1821. "You will please to present or convey the enclosed poem to Mr. Moore. I sent him another copy to Paris, but he has probably left that city. "Don't forget to send me my first act of 'Werner' (if Hobhouse can find it amongst my papers)--send it by the post (to Pisa); and also cut out Harriet Lee's 'German's Tale' from the 'Canterbury Tales,' and send it in a letter also. I began that tragedy in 1815.