ndour and gallantry to me,
turned into something much worse than one of Lydia White's
conversaziones."

Here is one of Byron's rattling descriptions of a Venetian night. The
date is December 27, 1816, and it is written to his publisher, Murray:
"As the news of Venice must be very interesting to you, I will regale
you with it. Yesterday being the feast of St. Stephen, every mouth was
put in motion. There was nothing but fiddling and playing on the
virginals, and all kinds of conceits and divertisements, on every canal
of this aquatic city.

"I dined with the Countess Albrizzi and a Paduan and Venetian party, and
afterwards went to the opera, at the Fenice theatre (which opens for the
Carnival on that day)--the finest, by the way, I have ever seen; it
beats our theatres hollow in beauty and scenery, and those of Milan and
Brescia bow before it. The opera and its Syrens were much like all other
operas and women, but the subject of the said opera was something
edifying; it turned--the plot and conduct thereof--upon a fact narrated
by Livy of a hundred and fifty married ladies having _poisoned_ a
hundred and fifty husbands in the good old times. The bachelors of Rome
believed this extraordinary mortality to be merely the common effect of
matrimony or a pestilence; but the surviving Benedicts, being all seized
with the cholic, examined into the matter, and found that their possets
had been drugged; the consequence of which was much scandal and several
suits at law.

"This is really and truly the subject of the Musical piece at the
Fenice; and you can't conceive what pretty things are sung and
recitativoed about the _horreda straga_. The conclusion was a lady's
head about to be chopped off by a Lictor, but (I am sorry to say) he
left it on, and she got up and sang a trio with the two Consuls, the
Senate in the background being chorus.

"The ballet was distinguished by nothing remarkable, except that the
principal she-dancer went into convulsions because she was not applauded
on her first appearance; and the manager came forward to ask if there
was 'ever a physician in the theatre'. There was a Greek one in my box,
whom I wished very much to volunteer his services, being sure that in
this case these would have been the last convulsions which would have
troubled the _Ballerina_; but he would not.

"The crowd was enormous; and in coming out, having a lady under my arm,
I was obliged in making way, almost to 'beat a Venetian