[According to a letter from Lord Byron, April 11, 1817, Dr. Polidori had at least three patients at Pisa—Francis Horner, a child of Thomas Hope, and Francis North, Lord Guilford. They all died—which may or may not have been partly the Doctor's fault.]
With this entry we come to the end of Dr. Polidori's Diary—although (as I have before intimated) not by any means to the end of his sojourn in Italy. He saw Byron again in April 1817 in Venice: Shelley, to the best of my knowledge, he never re-beheld.
I add here two letters which Polidori wrote to his sister Frances (my mother, then a girl of only sixteen), and two to his father. The first letter was written soon after beginning the journey with Byron; the last not long after the date of parting from him. I also add a letter sent to Mr. Hobhouse during Polidori's sojourn with Byron, and a note, of much later date, written by Mrs. Shelley to my father, Gabriele Rossetti.
The letter to Mr. Hobhouse, it will be observed, goes over some of the same details which appear in the Diary. This letter has been copied by me from the Broughton Papers, in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum (Add. MSS. 36456 to 36483). I did my best to trace whether these papers contain anything else relating to Polidori, and I do not think they do. In fact, the affairs of Lord Byron, and the very name of him, scarcely figure in those Broughton Papers at all: for instance, I could not find anything relating to his death.
John Polidori to Frances Polidori.
My dear Fanny,
I shall see Waterloo in a day or two—don't you wish to be with me? but there are many more things that I have seen which would have given you as much pleasure. Shakespear's Cliff at Dover, the French coast, the phosphorescent sea, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Brussels, have all got more than is in any of Feinaigh's plates to excite the memory to bring forth its hidden stores. The people amongst whom we are at present dwelling is one that has much distinguished itself in the noblest career, the race for liberty; but that tends little to the ennobling of a people without the sun of literature also deigns to shine upon them.
It was not the warlike deeds, the noble actions, of the Greeks and Romans or modern Italians, that has rescued these names from the effacing daub of oblivion; if it had not been for their poets, their historians, their philosophers, their heroes would in vain have struggled for fame. Their actions would have been recorded in the dusty legends of monks, and consequently have been forgotten, like those of the Belgians, Carthaginians, and others. How many fine actions of modern times will be buried in oblivion from the same want, and how many merely secondary characters will be handed down with a halo round their deeds reflected from the pages of historic genius!
I am very pleased with Lord Byron. I am with him on the footing of an equal, everything alike: at present here we have a suite of rooms between us. I have my sitting-room at one end, he at the other. He has not shown any passion; though we have had nothing but a series of mishaps that have put me out of temper though they have not ruffled his. The carriage, the new carriage, has had three stoppages. We are at present at Brussels merely to have the carriage-part well looked at and repaired.
The country till here has been one continued flat; and, except within this neighbourhood, we have not seen a rising ground on which to feast our eyes. Long avenues paved in the middle form the continued appearance of our roads. The towns are magnificently old, such as England cannot rival, and the state of cultivation is much greater than in England: indeed we have not seen a weed or a foot of waste ground all our way. The people in the country show no misery; the cottages comfortable, whitewashed, large-windowed, shining with brass utensils internally, and only having as many heaps of dirt as there are inhabitants—who certainly throw away all their cleanliness upon the house, fields, roads, and windows. But I will not fill my letter with this, as some time you will either see my Journal in writing or print—Murray having offered me 500 guineas for it through Lord Byron. L[ord] B[yron] is going to give me the manuscript, when done printing, of his new cantos of Childe Harold.[[41]]