A rising was proposed and even planned. The poet's letters to his publisher are full of dark references to the terrible things about to happen. A row is imminent, and he means to be in the thick of it. Heads are likely to be broken, and his own shall be risked with the rest. All other projects must be postponed to that contingency. He cannot even come to England as he had intended, to attend to his private affairs. And so on, in a series of letters, in one of which we find the significantly prophetic question, honoured with a paragraph to itself: "What thinkst thou of Greece?" It is the beginning, at last, of the awakening of Byron's sterner and more serious self--the first occasion on which we see the fierce joys of battle clearly meaning more to him than the soft delights of love. Only there was to be no battle this time, and hardly even a skirmish, and, in fact, very little beyond a scare. The Austrians were watching the Romagnese border much as a cat watches a mouse-hole. A week or so before the proposed insurrection was to have taken place, an Austrian army crossed the Po, and the proposed insurgents scattered and hid themselves. It only remained for the Government to arrest those of them whom it desired to keep under lock and key, and expel those whom it preferred to get rid of. Byron himself might very well have been lodged in an Austrian or Papal gaol through a scurvy trick played on him by some of the conspirators. He had provided a number of them with arms at his expense; and then the decree went forth that all persons found in possession of arms were to be treated as rebels. Whereupon the chicken-hearted crew came running to the Guiccioli Palace and begged Byron to take back his muskets. He was out at the time, but returned from his ride to find his apartment turned into an armoury; and it still remains uncertain whether he escaped molestation, as he thought, because his servants did not betray him, or, as seems more probable, because the Government preferred not to have such an embarrassing prisoner on their hands. If he would have been embarrassing as a prisoner, however, he was equally embarrassing as a resident; and, as his expulsion might have made a noise, it was decided to manoeuvre him out of the country by expelling the Gambas. Where they went Madame Guiccioli would have to go too, and where she went Byron might be expected to follow. We get his version of the story, together with a glimpse at his feelings, and at the new struggle in his mind between love and ambition, in a letter to Moore dated September 19, 1821;