Chapter 91

"Ravenna, March 14. 1820.

"Enclosed is Dante's Prophecy--Vision--or what not.[69] Where I have left more than one reading (which I have done often), you may adopt that which Gifford, Frere, Rose, and Hobhouse, and others of your Utican Senate think the best or least bad. The preface will explain all that is explicable. These are but the four first cantos: if approved, I will go on.

"Pray mind in printing; and let some good Italian scholar correct the Italian quotations.

"Four days ago I was overturned in an open carriage between the river and a steep bank:--wheels dashed to pieces, slight bruises, narrow escape, and all that; but no harm done, though coachman, foot-man, horses, and vehicle, were all mixed together like macaroni. It was owing to bad driving, as I say; but the coachman swears to a start on the part of the horses. We went against a post on the verge of a steep bank, and capsized. I usually go out of the town in a carriage, and meet the saddle horses at the bridge; it was in going there that we boggled; but I got my ride, as usual, after the accident. They say here it was all owing to St. Antonio of Padua, (serious, I assure you,)--who does thirteen miracles a day,--that worse did not come of it. I have no objection to this being his fourteenth in the four-and-twenty-hours. He presides over overturns and all escapes therefrom, it seems: and they dedicate pictures, &c. to him, as the sailors once did to Neptune, after 'the high Roman fashion.'

"Yours, in haste."

[Footnote 69: There were in this Poem, originally, three lines of remarkable strength and severity, which, as the Italian poet against whom they were directed was then living, were omitted in the publication. I shall here give them from memory.

"The prostitution of his Muse and wife, Both beautiful, and both by him debased, Shall salt his bread and give him means of life." ]

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