Adieu, my dearest love--remember Charles I. and Myrra. I have been already imagining how you will conduct some scenes. The second volume of “St Leon” begins with this proud and true sentiment--“There is nothing which the human mind can conceive, which it may not execute.” Shakespeare was only a human being. Adieu till Thursday. Your ever affectionate P. B. S. [17] Clara, born at Marlow, Sept. 3, 1817.--Ed. TO THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. _Este, October 8, 1818._ My dear Peacock, I have not written to you, I think, for six weeks. But I have been on the point of writing many times, and have often felt that I had many things to say. But I have not been without events to disturb and distract me, amongst which is the death of my little girl. She died of a disorder peculiar to the climate. We have all had bad spirits enough, and I, in addition, bad health. I _intend_ to be better soon: there is no malady, bodily or mental, which does not either kill or is killed. We left the Baths of Lucca, I think, the day after I wrote to you--on a visit to Venice--partly for the sake of seeing the city. We made a very delightful acquaintance there with a Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner, the gentleman an Englishman, and the lady a Swissesse, mild and beautiful, and unprejudiced, in the best sense of the word. The kind attentions of these people made our short stay at Venice very pleasant. I saw Lord Byron, and really hardly knew him again; he is changed into the liveliest and happiest-looking man I ever met. He read me the first canto of his “Don Juan”--a thing in the style of Beppo, but infinitely better, and dedicated to Southey, in ten or a dozen stanzas, more like a mixture of wormwood and verdigris than satire. Venice is a wonderfully fine city. The approach to it over the laguna, with its domes and turrets glittering in a long line over the blue waves, is one of the finest architectural delusions in the world. It seems to have--and literally it has--its foundations in the sea. The silent streets are paved with water, and you hear nothing but the dashing of the oars, and the occasional cries of the gondolieri. I heard nothing of Tasso. The gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic and picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis. They are hung with black, and painted black, and carpeted with grey; they curl at the prow and stern, and at the former there is a nondescript beak of shining steel, which glitters at the end of its long black mass.