ehind, was thought, soon
after, to require the still further advantage of a removal to Venice;
and the Count her husband, being written to on the subject, consented,
with the most complaisant readiness, that she should proceed thither in
company with Lord Byron. "Some business" (says the lady's own Memoir)
"having called Count Guiccioli to Ravenna, I was obliged, by the state
of my health, instead of accompanying him, to return to Venice, and he
consented that Lord Byron should be the companion of my journey. We left
Bologna on the fifteenth of September: we visited the Euganean Hills
and Arqua, and wrote our names in the book which is presented to those
who make this pilgrimage. But I cannot linger over these recollections
of happiness;--the contrast with the present is too dreadful. If a
blessed spirit, while in the full enjoyment of heavenly happiness, were
sent down to this earth to suffer all its miseries, the contrast could
not be more dreadful between the past and the present, than what I have
endured from the moment when that terrible word reached my ears, and I
for ever lost the hope of again beholding him, one look from whom I
valued beyond earth's all happiness. When I arrived at Venice, the
physicians ordered that I should try the country air, and Lord Byron,
having a villa at La Mira, gave it up to me, and came to reside there
with me. At this place we passed the autumn, and there I had the
pleasure of forming your acquaintance."[47]

It was my good fortune, at this period, in the course of a short and
hasty tour through the north of Italy, to pass five or six days with
Lord Byron at Venice. I had written to him on my way thither to announce
my coming, and to say how happy it would make me could I tempt him to
accompany me as far as Rome.

During my stay at Geneva, an opportunity had been afforded me of
observing the exceeding readiness with which even persons the least
disposed to be prejudiced gave an ear to any story relating to Lord
Byron, in which the proper portions of odium and romance were but
plausibly mingled. In the course of conversation, one day, with the late
amiable and enlightened Monsieur D * *, that gentleman related, with
much feeling, to my fellow-traveller and myself, the details of a late
act of seduction of which Lord Byron had, he said, been guilty, and
which was made to comprise within itself all the worst features of such
unmanly frauds upon innocence;--the victim, a young unmarri