nother letter he says, 'I leave Ravenna so unwillingly, and with such a
persuasion on my mind that my departure will lead from one misery to
another, each greater than the former, that I have not the heart to
utter another word on the subject.' He always wrote to me at that time
in Italian, and I transcribe his exact words. How entirely were these
presentiments verified by the event!"[60]

After describing his mode of life while at Ravenna, the lady thus
proceeds:--

"This sort of simple life he led until the fatal day of his departure
for Greece, and the few variations he made from it may be said to have
arisen solely from the greater or smaller number of occasions which were
offered him of doing good, and from the generous actions he was
continually performing. Many families (in Ravenna principally) owed to
him the few prosperous days they ever enjoyed. His arrival in that town
was spoken of as a piece of public good fortune, and his departure as a
public calamity; and this is the life which many attempted to asperse as
that of a libertine. But the world must at last learn how, with so good
and generous a heart, Lord Byron, susceptible, it is true, of the most
energetic passions, yet, at the same time, of the sublimest and most
pure, and rendering homage in his _acts_ to every virtue--how he, I say,
could afford such scope to malice and to calumny. Circumstances, and
also, probably, an eccentricity of disposition, (which, nevertheless,
had its origin in a virtuous feeling, an excessive abhorrence for
hypocrisy and affectation,) contributed, perhaps, to cloud the splendour
of his exalted nature in the opinion of many. But you will well know how
to analyse these contradictions in a manner worthy of your noble friend
and of yourself, and you will prove that the goodness of his heart was
not inferior to the grandeur of his genius."[61]

At Bologna, according to the appointment made between them, Lord Byron
and Mr. Rogers met; and the record which this latter gentleman has, in
his Poem on Italy, preserved of their meeting, conveys so vivid a
picture of the poet at this period, with, at the same time, so just and
feeling a tribute to his memory, that, narrowed as my limits are now
becoming, I cannot refrain from giving the sketch entire.

[Footnote 60: "Egli era partito con molto riverescimento da Ravenna, e
col pressentimento che la sua partenza da Ravenna ci sarebbe cagione di
molti mali. In ogni lettera che egli mi sc