. Dr.
Polidori has, just now, no more patients, because his patients are
no more. He had lately three, who are now all dead--one embalmed.
Horner and a child of Thomas Hope's are interred at Pisa and Rome.
Lord G * * died of an inflammation of the bowels: so they took them
out, and sent them (on account of their discrepancies), separately
from the carcass, to England. Conceive a man going one way, and his
intestines another, and his immortal soul a third!--was there ever
such a distribution? One certainly has a soul; but how it came to
allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I
only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before
I let it get in again to that or any other.

"And so poor dear Mr. Maturin's second tragedy has been neglected
by the discerning public! * * will be d----d glad of this, and
d----d without being glad, if ever his own plays come upon 'any
stage.'

"I wrote to Rogers the other day, with a message for you. I hope
that he flourishes. He is the Tithonus of poetry--immortal
already. You and I must wait for it.

"I hear nothing--know nothing. You may easily suppose that the
English don't seek me, and I avoid them. To be sure, there are but
few or none here, save passengers. Florence and Naples are their
Margate and Ramsgate, and much the same sort of company too, by all
accounts, which hurts us among the Italians.

"I want to hear of Lalla Rookh--are you out? Death and fiends! why
don't you tell me where you are, what you are, and how you are? I
shall go to Bologna by Ferrara, instead of Mantua: because I would
rather see the cell where they caged Tasso, and where he became mad
and * *, than his own MSS. at Modena, or the Mantuan birthplace of
that harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed
hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow. I saw Verona and Vicenza
on my way here--Padua too.

"I go alone,--but alone, because I mean to return here. I only want
to see Rome. I have not the least curiosity about Florence, though
I must see it for the sake of the Venus, &c. &c.; and I wish also
to see the Fall of Terni. I think to return to Venice by Ravenna
and Rimini, of both of which I mean to take notes for Leigh Hunt,
who will be glad to hear of the scenery of his Poem