Page:The Diary of Dr John William Polidori.djvu/221

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LETTERS
209

[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