This is not the note of a man who has found happiness in love or even pleasure in dissipation. Apparently the novelty of the new experiences was wearing off; and Byron was becoming sick of the isolation and uneventfulness of his life. He had gone to Venice largely because there was no English society there--and yet he missed it; Hoppner, the Consul-General being almost his only English friend. He had access to Venetian society, and to some extent, mixed in it; but he did not find it interesting. He tired of the receptions alike of Signora Benzoni the worldly, and of Signora Albrizzi the "blue," at which, no doubt, he was stared at as a marvel of fascinating profligacy; and he also tired of Marianna Segati, who doubtless gave him an excuse for breaking off his relations with her; and then there followed a further and deeper plunge. The departure of Hobhouse seems, as usual, to have given the signal. It was about the time of his departure that Byron gave up his lodging in the draper's shop and moved into the Mocenigo Palace; and the letter in which Murray is advised that Hobhouse is on his way home continues thus: "It is the height of the Carnival, and I am in the _estrum_ and agonies of a new intrigue with I don't exactly know whom or what, except that she is insatiate of love, and won't take money, and has light hair and blue eyes, which are not common here, and that I met her at the Masque, and that when her mask is off, I am as wise as ever. I shall make what I can of the remainder of my youth." A vow which he kept after a fashion as innumerable passages from innumerable letters prove--Moore, Murray, and James Wedderburn Webster receiving his confidences in turn. Venice, he assures the last named, "is by no means the most regular and correct moral city in the universe;" and he continues, describing the life there--not everybody's life, of course, but the life with which he has chosen to associate himself: "Young and old--pretty and ugly--high and low--are employed in the laudable practice of Love-making--and though most Beauty is found amongst the middling and lower classes--this of course only renders their amatory habits more universally diffused." Then to Moore there is talk of "a Venetian girl with large black eyes, a face like Faustina's and the figure of a Juno--tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes flashing, and her dark eyes streaming in the moonlight;" while to Murray there is a long account of the affair with Margarita Cogni, the baker's wife, with whom the draper's wife disputed publicly for Byron's favours: