"If anything happens to my present _Amica_, I have done with passion for ever, it is my _last_ love. As to libertinism, I have sickened myself of that, as was natural in the way I went on, and have at least derived that advantage from vice, to _love_ in the better sense of the word. _This_ will be my last adventure. I can hope no more to inspire attachment, and I trust never again to feel it." But then, in a letter to Murray, dated August 9, there is a relapse and a change of tone: "My 'Mistress dear,' who hath 'fed my heart upon smiles and wine' for the last two months, set out for Bologna with her husband this morning, and it seems that I follow him at three to-morrow morning. I cannot tell how our romance will end, but it hath gone on hitherto most erotically--such perils and escapes--Juan's are a child's play in comparison." Gallantry, not passion, is the note there; but, on the other hand, passion and not gallantry prevails in the letter to the Countess, written on a blank page of her copy of "Corinne," which Byron had read in her garden in her absence: "My destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had stayed there, with all my heart, or, at least, that I had never met you in your married state. "But all this is too late. I love you and you love me--at least you _say so_, and _act_ as if you _did_ so, which last is a great consolation in all events. But _I_ more than love you, and cannot cease to love you." "Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us--but they never will unless you _wish_ it." A series of contradictions with which we must be content to be perplexed; though perhaps they indicate nothing except that Byron changed his mind from time to time, and was more in love on some days than on others. And that, of course, it may be urged, is pretty much the same as saying that he was not, in the fullest sense of the words, in love at all. That his feelings for the Countess differed from his feelings for the wives of the baker and the draper is, indeed, clear enough. Otherwise he would not have drawn the invidious distinction which we have seen him drawing between the "libertinism" of the earlier intrigues and the "romance" of the later one. Those passions had depended solely on the senses; into this one sentiment and intellectual sympathy entered. That is what his biographers are thinking of when they say that the new attachment either lifted him out of the mire or, at least, prevented him from slipping back into it. That, in particular, is what Shelley meant when he wrote of Byron as "greatly improved in every respect" and apparently becoming "a virtuous man," and added, by way of explanation: "The connection with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him."