Horn above all the sights he had seen, and now first abandoned his design of travelling to Persia.  Galt, and other more or less gossiping travellers, have accumulated a number of incidents of the poet’s life at this period, of his fanciful dress, blazing in scarlet and gold, and of his sometimes absurd contentions for the privileges of rank—­as when he demanded precedence of the English ambassador in an interview with the Sultan, and, on its refusal, could only be pacified by the assurances of the Austrian internuncio.  In converse with indifferent persons he displayed a curious alternation of frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit of letting people up and down, by which he frequently gave offence.  More interesting are narratives of the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in Don Juan, and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the Bride of Abydos.  One example is, if we except Dante’s Ugolino, the most remarkable instance in literature of the expansion, without the weakening, of the horrible.  Take first Mr. Hobhouse’s plain prose:  “The sensations produced by the state of the weather”—­it was wretched and stormy when they left the “Salsette” for the city—­“and leaving a comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which we felt when, passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypress which rises above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body.”  After this we may measure the almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination brooding over the incident,—­

  And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
  Hold o’er the dead their carnival: 
  Gorging and growling o’er carcass and limb,
  They were too busy to bark at him. 
  From a Tartar’s skull they had stripp’d the flesh,
  As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
  And their white tusks crunch’d on the whiter skull,
  As it slipp’d through their jaws when their edge grow dull.

No one ever more persistently converted the incidents of travel into poetic material; but sometimes in doing so he borrowed more largely from his imagination than his memory, as in the description of the seraglio, of which there is reason to doubt his having seen more than the entrance.

Byron and Hobhouse set sail from Constantinople on the 14th July, 1810—­the latter to return direct to England, a determination which, from no apparent fault on either side, the former did not regret.  One incident of the passage derives interest from its possible consequence.  Taking up, and unsheathing, a yataghan which he found on the quarter deck, ho remarked, “I should like to know how a person feels after committing a murder.”  This harmless piece of melodrama—­the idea of which is expanded in Mr. Dobell’s Balder, and parodied in Firmilian—­may have been the basis of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by Goethe, that his lordship