fighting

"'Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens,
And toiled with works of war, retired himself
To Italy, and there, at _Venice_, gave
His body to that _pleasant_ country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.'

"Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr.
Hobhouse's sheets of Juan. Don't wait for further answers from me,
but address yours to Venice, as usual. I know nothing of my own
movements; I may return there in a few days, or not for some time.
All this depends on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well. My
daughter Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty; her hair is
growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr.
Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will
make, in that case, a manageable young lady.

"I have never heard any thing of Ada, the little Electra of
Mycenae. But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should
not live to see it.[35] What a long letter I have scribbled! Yours,
&c.

"P.S. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a
quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the
graves at Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can
imagine."

[Footnote 34: Though Lord Byron, like most other persons, in writing to
different friends, was sometimes led to repeat the same circumstances
and thoughts, there is, from the ever ready fertility of his mind, much
less of such repetition in his correspondence than in that, perhaps, of
any other multifarious letter-writer; and, in the instance before us,
where the same facts and reflections are, for the second time,
introduced, it is with such new touches, both of thought and expression,
as render them, even a second time, interesting;--what is wanting in the
novelty of the matter being made up by the new aspect given to it.]

[Footnote 35: There were, in the former edition, both here and in a
subsequent letter, some passages reflecting upon the late Sir Samuel
Romilly, which, in my anxiety to lay open the workings of Lord Byron's
mind upon a subject in which so much of his happiness and character were
involved, I had been induced to retain, though aware of the erroneous
impression under which they were written;--the evident morbidness of the
feeling that dicta