This is a strikingly interesting, because an unconsciously prophetic, passage. Byron's ultimate efforts to "do something"--something quite unconnected with literature--is the most famous, and some would say the most glorious, incident in his life. We shall come to it very soon, and we shall see how his constitution, so sorely tried by an indiscreet diet and excessive indulgence in all things from love to Epsom Salts, just allowed him to begin his task, but did not suffer him to finish it. Enough to note here that Byron saw the better even when he preferred the worse, and never lost faith in himself even in his most degraded years, but always looked forward, even then, to the day when he would shake off sloth and sensuality in order to be worthy of his higher self. He divined that the power to do that would be restored to him in the end--that social outlawry, though it might daze him, could not crush him--that it would come to be, in the end, a kind of education, and a source of self-reliance. But not yet, and not for a good many years to come. Before the moral recovery could begin, the moral collapse had to be completed; and the affair with the draper's wife was only the first milestone on the downward path. We shall have to follow him past other milestones before we see him turning back. CHAPTER XXV AT VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER'S WIFE--DISSOLUTE PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE--ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND REFORMATION For six weeks or so in May and June 1817 Byron tore himself away from Marianna and visited Rome, where he dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat to Thorwaldsen for his bust, and gathered the materials for the Fourth Canto of "Childe Harold." He refused, however, for Marianna's sake, to go on with Hobhouse to Naples, but hurried back to her, bidding her meet him half-way, and afterwards taking her, but not her husband, to a villa at La Mira, on the Brenta, a few miles out of Venice. It seems that the neighbours, less particular than the leaders of English society, yet including a marquis as well as a physician with four unmarried daughters, hastened to call, if not on the lady, at all events on him. Monk Lewis paid him a short visit, and Hobhouse, on his return from Naples, stayed for some time in a house close by, studying in the Ducal Library, and amassing the erudition which appears in his notes to "Childe Harold." Praise of Marianna, however, disappears from Byron's letters at this period; and one may infer from his comment on the news of the death of Madame de Staël that, if Marianna had ever made him happy, she had now ceased to do so. "With regard to death," he then wrote to Murray, "I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes."