ter too, of his
letters in this respect cannot fail, I think, to be remarked by the
reader,--there being, with an evident increase of intellectual vigour, a
tone of violence and bravado breaking out in them continually, which
marks the high pitch of re-action to which he had now wound up his
temper.

In fact, so far from the powers of his intellect being at all weakened
or dissipated by these irregularities, he was, perhaps, at no time of
his life, so actively in the full possession of all its energies; and
his friend Shelley, who went to Venice, at this period, to see him[23],
used to say, that all he observed of the workings of Byron's mind,
during his visit, gave him a far higher idea of its powers than he had
ever before entertained. It was, indeed, then that Shelley sketched out,
and chiefly wrote, his poem of "Julian and Maddalo," in the latter of
which personages he has so picturesquely shadowed forth his noble
friend[24]; and the allusions to "the Swan of Albion," in his "Lines
written among the Euganean Hills," were also, I understand, the result
of the same access of admiration and enthusiasm.

In speaking of the Venetian women, in one of the preceding letters,
Lord Byron, it will be recollected, remarks, that the beauty for which
they were once so celebrated is no longer now to be found among the
"Dame," or higher orders, but all under the "fazzioli," or kerchiefs, of
the lower. It was, unluckily, among these latter specimens of the "bel
sangue" of Venice that he now, by a suddenness of descent in the scale
of refinement, for which nothing but the present wayward state of his
mind can account, chose to select the companions of his disengaged
hours;--and an additional proof that, in this short, daring career of
libertinism, he was but desperately seeking relief for a wronged and
mortified spirit, and

"What to us seem'd guilt might be but woe,"--

is that, more than once, of an evening, when his house has been in the
possession of such visitants, he has been known to hurry away in his
gondola, and pass the greater part of the night upon the water, as if
hating to return to his home. It is, indeed, certain, that to this least
defensible portion of his whole life he always looked back, during the
short remainder of it, with painful self-reproach; and among the causes
of the detestation which he afterwards felt for Venice, this
recollection of the excesses to which he had there abandoned himself was
not