was inclined to believe that Lord Byron entertained very fixed opinions.  On politics he used sometimes to express a high strain of what is now called Liberalism; but it appeared to me that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit of thinking.  At heart, I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle.  His reading did not seem to me to have been very extensive.  I remember repeating to him the fine poem of Hardyknute, and some one asked me what I could possibly have been telling Byron by which he was so much agitated.  I saw him for the last time in (September) 1815, after I returned from France; he dined or lunched with me at Long’s in Bond Street.  I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humour.  The day of this interview was the most interesting I ever spent.  Several letters passed between us—­one perhaps every half year.  Like the old heroes in Homer we exchanged gifts; I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey.  But I was to play the part of Diomed in the Iliad, for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of dead men’s bones, found within the land walls of Athens.  He was often melancholy, almost gloomy.  When I observed him in this humour I used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when the shadows almost always left his countenance, like the mist arising from a landscape.  I think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret and perhaps offensive meaning in something that was said to him.  In this case I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself clear, which it did in a minute or two.  A downright steadiness of manner was the way to his good opinion.  Will Rose, looking by accident at his feet, saw him scowling furiously; but on his showing no consciousness, his lordship resumed his easy manner.  What I liked about him, besides his boundless genius, was his generosity of spirit as well as of purse, and his utter contempt of all the affectations of literature.  He liked Moore and me because, with all our other differences, we were both good-natured fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the mot-pour-rire.  He wrote from impulse never from effort, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me.  We have many men of high poetic talents, but none of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters.”