estward of Venice, in the track of the setting
sun.]

[408] The above description may seem fantastical or exaggerated to those
who have never seen an Oriental or an Italian sky; yet it is but a
literal and hardly sufficient delineation of an August evening (the
eighteenth), as contemplated in one of many rides along the banks of the
Brenta, near La Mira.

[Compare Shelley's _Julian and Maddalo_
(_Poetical Works_, 1895, i. 343)--

"How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!
* * * * *
... We stood
Looking upon the evening, and the flood,
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky ... the hoar
And aery Alps towards the north appeared,
Thro' mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared
Between the East and West; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep West into a wondrous hue,
Brighter than burning gold."]

[409] {349} [The Brenta rises in Tyrol, and flowing past Padua falls
into the Lagoon at Fusina. Mira, or La Mira, where Byron "colonized" in
the summer of 1817, and again in 1819, is on the Brenta, some six or
seven miles inland from the Lagoon.]

[410] {350} [The Abbe de Sade, in his _Memoires pour la vie de
Petrarque_ (1767), affirmed, on the strength of documentary evidence,
that the Laura of the sonnets, born de Noves, was the wife of his
ancestor, Hugo de Sade, and the mother of a large family. "Gibbon," says
Hobhouse (note viii.), "called the abbe's memoirs a 'labour of love'
(see _Decline and Fall_, chap. lxx. note 1), and followed him with
confidence and delight;" but the poet James Beattie (in a letter to the
Duchess of Gordon, August 17, 1782) disregarded them as a "romance,"
and, more recently, "an ingenious Scotchman" [Alexander Fraser Tytler
(Lord Woodhouselee)], in an _Historical and Critical Essay on the Life
and Character of Petrarch_ (1810), had re-established "the ancient
prejudice" in favour of Laura's virginity. Hobhouse appears, but his
note is somewhat ambiguous, to adopt the view of "the ingenious
Scotchman." To pass to contemporary criticism, Dr. Garnett, in his
_History of Italian Literature_, 1898 (pp. 66-71), without attempting to
settle "the everlasting controversy," regards the abbe's docume