"By this post I have sent my nightmare to balance the incubus of * * *'s impudent anticipation of the Apotheosis of George the Third. I should like you to take a look over it, as I think there are two or three things in it which might please 'our puir hill folk.'
"By the last two or three posts I have written to you at length. My ague bows to me every two or three days, but we are not as yet upon intimate speaking terms. I have an intermittent generally every two years, when the climate is favourable (as it is here), but it does me no harm. What I find worse, and cannot get rid of, is the growing depression of my spirits, without sufficient cause. I ride—I am not intemperate in eating or drinking—and my general health is as usual, except a slight ague, which rather does good than not. It must be constitutional; for I know nothing more than usual to depress me to that degree.
"How do you manage? I think you told me, at Venice, that your spirits did not keep up without a little claret. I can drink, and bear a good deal of wine (as you may recollect in England); but it don't exhilarate—it makes me savage and suspicious, and even quarrelsome. Laudanum has a similar effect; but I can take much of it without any effect at all. The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a close of salts—I mean in the afternoon, after their effect.[58] But one can't take them like champagne.
"Excuse this old woman's letter; but my lemancholy don't depend upon health, for it is just the same, well or ill, or here or there.
"Yours," &c.
LETTER 462. TO MR. MURRAY.
"Ravenna, October 9. 1821.
"You will please to present or convey the enclosed poem to Mr. Moore. I sent him another copy to Paris, but he has probably left that city.
"Don't forget to send me my first act of 'Werner' (if Hobhouse can find it amongst my papers)—send it by the post (to Pisa); and also cut out Harriet Lee's 'German's Tale' from the 'Canterbury Tales,' and send it in a letter also. I began that tragedy in 1815.