"Venice, April 2. 1817.
"I sent you the whole of the Drama at _three several_ times, act by
act, in separate covers. I hope that you have, or will receive,
some or the whole of it.
"So Love has a conscience. By Diana! I shall make him take back the
box, though it were Pandora's. The discovery of its intrinsic
silver occurred on sending it to have the lid adapted to admit
Marianna's portrait. Of course I had the box remitted _in statu
quo_, and had the picture set in another, which suits it (the
picture) very well. The defaulting box is not touched, hardly, and
was not in the man's hands above an hour.
"I am aware of what you say of Otway; and am a very great admirer
of his,--all except of that maudlin b--h of chaste lewdness and
blubbering curiosity, Belvidera, whom I utterly despise, abhor, and
detest. But the story of Marino Faliero 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 Staël. 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 was by sympathy that I had my fever at the
same time.
"I joy in the success of your Quarterly, but I must still stick by
the Edinburgh; Jeffrey has done so by me, I must say, through every
thing, and this is more than I deserved from him. I have more than
once acknowledged to you by letter the 'Article' (and articles);
say that you have received the said letters, as I do not otherwise
know what letters arrive. Both Reviews came, but nothing more. M.'s
play and the extract not yet come.
"Write to say whether my Magician has arrived, with all his scenes,
spells, &c. Yours ever, &c.
"It is useless to send to the _Foreign Office_: nothing arrives to
me by that conveyance. I suppose some zealous clerk thinks it a
Tory duty to prevent it."
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