ards to me,
and saying he gave me five hundred guineas for them. He lies--never
wrote such stuff, never saw the poems, nor the publisher of them,
in my life, nor had any communication, directly or indirectly, with
the fellow. Pray say as much for me, if need be. I have written to
Murray, to make him contradict the impostor."

* * * * *

LETTER 254. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Venice, November 25. 1816.

"It is some months since I have heard from or of you--I think, not
since I left Diodati. From Milan I wrote once or twice; but have
been here some little time, and intend to pass the winter without
removing. I was much pleased with the Lago di Garda, and with
Verona, particularly the amphitheatre, and a sarcophagus in a
convent garden, which they show as Juliet's: they insist on the
_truth_ of her history. Since my arrival at Venice, the lady of the
Austrian governor told me that between Verona and Vicenza there are
still ruins of the castle of the _Montecchi_, and a chapel once
appertaining to the Capulets. Romeo seems to have been of Vicenza
by the tradition; but I was a good deal surprised to find so firm a
faith in Bandello's novel, which seems really to have been founded
on a fact.

"Venice pleases me as much as I expected, and I expected much. It
is one of those places which I know before I see them, and has
always haunted me the most after the East. I like the gloomy gaiety
of their gondolas, and the silence of their canals. I do not even
dislike the evident decay of the city, though I regret the
singularity of its vanished costume; however, there is much left
still; the Carnival, too, is coming.

"St. Mark's, and indeed Venice, is most alive at night. The
theatres are not open till _nine_, and the society is
proportionably late. All this is to my taste, but most of your
countrymen miss and regret the rattle of hackney coaches, without
which they can't sleep.

"I have got remarkably good apartments in a private house; I see
something of the inhabitants (having had a good many letters to
some of them); I have got my gondola; I read a little, and luckily
could speak Italian (more fluently than correctly) long ago, I am
studying, out of curiosity, the _Venetian_ dialect, which is very
naive, and soft, and p