forget the pleasant hours I have passed with him. He seemed quite broken down when I had a glimpse of him a few months since at Eton. I hardly knew him again, and should not have done so had he not mentioned his name.' See also Thomas Colley Grattan, Beaten Paths and Those Who Trod Them (London, 1862). The Cocoa Tree:-A famous club in St. James's Street. It sprang out of the Cocoa Tree Chocolate House, a Tory centre in Queen Anne's time, and, Timbs says, existed as a club 'probably before 1746.' Horace Walpole appears to mention it in a letter to George Montague (1746), and Gibbon refers to it in his Journal (1762). And Hodgson has been publishing more poems:-The Sir Edgar'A Tale in Two Cantos: With Serious Translations from the Antients and Merry Imitations of a Modern' (London, 1810). Bland's 'Anthology' :-This is Translations chiefly from the Greek Anthology, etc. (London, 1806). For Bland, see ante, p. 347. Note to Letter lxiii. By next Montem:-A ceremony which, as Provost of Eton, their common friend Hodgson was afterwards (1847) to abolish. LETTER lxvii. p. 97. Mr. Hobhouse... is on his way to England :— The ambassador,' says Hobhouse, on the last page of his Travels, had his audience of the Seraglio on the roth of July; on the evening of the 14th we embarked on board the Salsette, and after touching at the Dardanelles and at the island of Zea, where Lord Byron left the frigate on his return to Attica, we arrived on the 28th of the same month at Malta, from which place it may be recollected that the foregoing tour originally commenced.' Byron's letter, then, appears to have been written in anticipation of the ambassador's departure. Her ladyship, so far as I can judge, has lied :--See the charming description in the Letters during Mr. Wortley's Embassy (June 17, O.S., 1717) of Belgrade Village, as the Elysian Fields:-'I am in the middle of a wood, consisting chiefly of fruit-trees, watered by a vast number of fountains famous for the excellency of their water, and divided into many shady walks upon short grass that seems to me artificial, but, I am assured, is the pure work of nature; and within view of the Black Sea, from whence we perpetually enjoy the refreshment of cool breezes, that make us insensible of the heat of the summer,' etc. Lady Wortley errs strangely:-So does Byron. Lady Mary does not contrast St. Sophia's and St. Paul's, but St. Paul's and the Valedé-Sultán' mosque: 'the largest of all built entirely of marble, the most prodigious, and, I think, the most beautiful structure I ever saw. . . . Between friends, St. Paul's Church would make a pitiful figure near it, as any of our squares,' etc. LETTER lxviii. p. 103. That matrimonial man:-Henry Drury was the first of the Byron group to marry. His wife was Caroline Taylor, daughter of A. W. Taylor of Boreham Wood, Hertfordshire. His sister married Merivale, his wife's sister Hodgson; so that the secession from the aforesaid Byron group was whole-hearted and complete indeed. Aberdeen's party split:-George Hamilton Gordon (1784-1860), Fourth Earl of Aberdeen, travelled (1802-1804) in France, Italy, Greece (where he 'rediscovered and excavated the Pnyx')—and Asia Minor; was elected President of the Society of Antiquaries; and published (1822) an Inquiry into the Principles of Grecian Architecture. Byron was disposed to rank him with the Lord Elgin of The Curse of Minerva : Ah! Athens, scarce escaped from Turk and Goth, Hell sends a paltry Scotsman worse than both :— and called upon him vehemently in a stanza (suppressed) of the Second Harold: Come, then, ye classic Thanes of each degree, Dark Hamilton, and sullen Aberdeen, Come pilfer all the Pilgrim loves to see, All that yet consecrates the fading scene: The Russians and Turks are at it:-Two years afterwards there was a peace, when the country between the Pruth and the Dniester was ceded to Russia. LETTER lxix. p. 105. The Marquis of Sligo, my old fellow-collegian :-This was Howe Peter Browne (1788-1845), Second Marquess of Sligo, who in 1813 married Hester Catharine, eldest daughter of the Thirteenth Earl of Clanricarde. Like most of the men of his age, he was a patron of Pugilism, and in 1813, on the occasion of Tom Belcher's second fight with Dogherty, I find him giving five guineas at the ring-side towards a purse for the twice-beaten Irishman. Withal, he was something of an antiquary, and the vases, lachrymatories, and gold ornaments which he found in the tombs of Hellas were taken by him to Westport House, Westport, where they now are. To understand what follows, one must know that at Gibraltar he had joined Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1829), then starting on that uncommon adventure which was to stamp her one of the most notable women of her time. At Gibraltar she had arrived with her brother, Captain Stanhope; but at Gibraltar Stanhope was ordered to rejoin his regiment, and either she must have turned back, or she must have come on alone, had not Michael Bruce the Bruce who was to contrive the escape of Lavalette with Hutchinson and Sir Robert Wilson (1815)-not undertaken to escort her on the perilous journey which she had resolved to make through European Turkey. (Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope. . . . Narrated By Her Physician,' London, 1846, i. 4.) At the Piræus, adds the Physician, 'just as we were passing the mole-head, we saw a man jump from it into the sea, whom Lord Sligo recognised to be Lord Byron himself, and, hailing him, bade him hasten to dress and to come and join us.' The sequel may be told in Moore's own words :- It was in the course, I believe, of their first interview, at his (Lord Sligo's) table, that Lady Hester, with that lively eloquence for which she is so remarkable, took the poet briskly to task for the depreciating opinion, which, as she understood, he entertained of all female intellect. Being but little inclined, were he even able, to sustain such a heresy, against one who was in her own person such an irresistible refutation of it, Lord Byron had no other refuge from the fair orator's arguments than in assent and silence; and this well-bred deference being, in a sensible woman's eyes, equivalent to concession, they became, from thenceforward, most cordial friends. In recalling some recollections of this period in his Memoranda, after relating the circumstance of his being caught bathing by an English party at Sunium, he added, "This was the beginning of the most delightful acquaintance which I formed in Greece." He then went on to assure Mr. Bruce, if ever those pages should meet his eyes, that the days they had passed together at Athens were remembered by him with pleasure.' Further, Lord Sligo told Moore several anecdotes of Byron, which may here be reproduced. The first was recalled as a proof of the poet's consciousness of his beauty:-'He was a good deal weakened and thinned by his illness at Patras, and, on his return to Athens, standing one day before a looking-glass, he said to Lord Sligo"How pale I look !-I should like, I think, to die of a consumption?"-" 'Why of a consumption?" asked his friend. "Because then (he answered) the women would all say, 'See that poor Byron -how interesting he looks in dying!'"' The next is an anticipation of The Deformed Transformed:-' He spoke often of his mother. . . and with a feeling that seemed little short of aversion. "Some time or other," he said, "I will tell you why I feel thus towards her."-A few days after, when they were bathing together in the Gulf of Lepanto, he referred to this promise, and, pointing to his naked leg and foot, exclaimed-"Look there!—it is to her false delicacy at my birth I owe that deformity; and yet as long as I can remember, she has never ceased to taunt and reproach me with it. Even a few days before we parted, for the last time, on my leaving England, she, in one of her fits of passion, uttered an imprecation upon me, praying that I might prove as ill formed in mind as I am in body!" His look and manner, in relating this frightful circumstance, can be conceived only by those who have ever seen him in a similar state of excitement.' The little value,' Moore goes on to say, he had for those relics of ancient art, in pursuit of which he saw all his classic fellow-travellers so ardent, was, like everything he ever thought or felt, unreservedly avowed by him. Lord Sligo having it in contemplation to expend some money in digging for antiquities, Lord Byron, in offering to act as his agent said "You may safely trust me--I am no dilettante. Your connoisseurs are all thieves; but I care too little for these things ever to steal them." A profession of indifference which is fully con firmed by Galt. To Lord Sligo, too, we are probably indebted for the information that the system of thinning himself, which he (Byron) had begun before he left England, was continued still more rigidly abroad. While at Athens he took the hot bath for this purpose three times a week, his usual drink being vinegar and water, and his food seldom more than a little rice.'-MOORE. As for Byron's 'tour of the Morea':-'In a note upon the Advertisement prefixed to his Siege of Corinth, he says-"I visited all three (Tripolitza, Napoli, and Argos) in 1810-11, and in the course of journeying through the country, from my first arrival in 1809, crossed the Isthmus eight times in my way from Attica to the Morea, over the mountains, or in the other direction, when passing from the Gulf of Athens to that of Lepanto."'-Moore. LETTER lxx. p. 108. My nature leads me to solitude:-Those who saw Byron about this time state that his habit was one of unchanging melancholyeven dejection. Surely a not uncommon circumstance with youth? LETTER lxxii. p. 111. I have made a tour of the Morea and visited Veley Pacha:-A son of the redoubtable Ali : for an account of whom, and his civilities to Byron and Hobhouse, see the Travels (i. 93-116, Ed. 1855). 'A lively young man,' says Hobhouse, 'and besides the Albanian, Greek, and Turkish languages, speaks Italian, an accomplishment not possessed by any other man of his high rank '-(he was a pasha of three tails)'in Turkey.' His ottomans, being draped with scarlet, reminded Galt (who 'perceived in him a considerable tincture of drollery,' and whose description abounds in turbans and daggers and jewels) of 'the woolsacks in the House of Lords.' He fell with his father (1822), and his cenotaph, with those of Ali and the others of his house, only two of which survived, 'is seen at the Silivria Gate at Constantinople.'-(H. ut sup.) I see the Lady of the Lake' advertised :—It was published in the May of 1810, and 20,000 copies-2050 in quarto-had been sold by the end of the year. He had a farce ready for the stage before I left England:—' This farce was entitled Not at Home, and was acted, though with moderate success, at the Lyceum, by the Drury Lane Company, in November 1809. It was afterwards printed, with a Prologue (intended to have been spoken) written by Walter Rodwell Wright, Esq., author of Hora Ionica.'-MOORE. Drury Lane the Third was burned down in 1809. The ruling passions of Pope are nothing to it:-See Pope, Moral Essays (c. 1731-35), Epistle i. 174-9, etc. :— Search, then, the ruling passion: there, alone, and Moral Essays, Epistle iii. 153-4, etc. : The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still. See also Burns in his rough and ready imitation of Goldsmith's Retaliation, the verses Inscribed to the Right Hon. C. J. Fox: All in all [Man's] a problem must puzzle the devil. On his one Ruling Passion Sir Pope strongly labours, That, like th' old Hebrew walking-switch, eats up its neighbours: What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system, One trifling particular-Truth-should have missed him! For, spite of his fine theoretic positions, |