ro is different, and, I think,
so much finer, that I wish Otway had taken it instead: the head
conspiring against the body for refusal of redress for a real
injury,--jealousy--treason, with the more fixed and inveterate
passions (mixed with policy) of an old or elderly man--the devil
himself could not have a finer subject, and he is your only tragic
dramatist.

"There is still, in the Doge's palace, the black veil painted over
Faliero's picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned
Doge, and subsequently decapitated. This was the thing that most
struck my imagination in Venice--more than the Rialto, which I
visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's
'_Armenian_,' a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It
is also called the 'Ghost Seer,' and I never walked down St. Mark's
by moonlight without thinking of it, and 'at nine o'clock he
died!'--But I hate things _all fiction_; and therefore the
_Merchant_ and _Othello_ have no great associations to me: but
_Pierre_ has. There should always be some foundation of fact for
the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a
liar.

"Maturin's tragedy.--By your account of him last year to me, he
seemed a bit of a coxcomb, personally. Poor fellow! to be sure, he
had had a long seasoning of adversity, which is not so hard to bear
as t'other thing. I hope that this won't throw him back into the
'slough of Despond.'

"You talk of 'marriage;'--ever since my own funeral, the word makes
me giddy, and throws me into a cold sweat. Pray, don't repeat it.

"You should close with Madame de Stael. This will be her best work,
and permanently historical; it is on her father, the Revolution,
and Buonaparte, &c. Bunstetten told me in Switzerland it was
_very_ _great_. I have not seen it myself, but the author often.
She was very kind to me at Copet.

"There have been two articles in the Venice papers, one a Review of
Glenarvon * * * *, and the other a Review of Childe Harold, in
which it proclaims me the most rebellious and contumacious admirer
of Buonaparte now surviving in Europe. Both these articles are
translations from the Literary Gazette of German Jena.

"Tell me that Walter Scott is better. I would not have him ill for
the world. I suppose it