some other persons below the earth, answered coolly that “they did not know, but believed that there were.”  Enraged at this brutal indifference, he sprang from his horse, and seizing a spade himself, began to dig with all his strength; but it was not till after being threatened with the horsewhip that any of the peasants could be brought to follow his example.  “I was not present at this scene myself,” says Colonel Napier, in the Notices with which he has favoured me, “but was told that Lord Byron’s attention seemed quite absorbed in the study of the faces and gesticulations of those whose friends were missing.  The sorrow of the Greeks is, in appearance, very frantic, and they shriek and howl, as in Ireland.

It was in alluding to the above incident that the noble poet is stated to have said that he had come out to the Islands prejudiced against Sir T. Maitland’s government of the Greeks:  “but,” he added, “I have now changed my opinion.  They are such barbarians, that if I had the government of them, I would pave these very roads with them.”

While residing at Metaxata, he received an account of the illness of his daughter Ada, which “made him anxious and melancholy (says Count Gamba) for several days.”  Her indisposition he understood to have been caused by a determination of blood to the head; and on his remarking to Dr. Kennedy, as curious, that it was a complaint to which he himself was subject, the physician replied, that he should have been inclined to infer so, not only from his habits of intense and irregular study, but from the present state of his eyes,—­the right eye appearing to be inflamed.  I have mentioned this latter circumstance as perhaps justifying the inference that there was in Lord Byron’s state of health at this moment a predisposition to the complaint of which he afterwards died.  To Dr. Kennedy he spoke frequently of his wife and daughter, expressing the Strongest affection for the latter, and respect towards the former, and while declaring as usual his perfect ignorance of the causes of the separation, professing himself fully disposed to welcome any prospect of reconcilement.

The anxiety with which, at all periods of his life, but particularly at the present, he sought to repel the notion that, except when under the actual inspiration of writing, he was at all influenced by poetical associations, very frequently displayed itself.  “You must have been highly gratified (said a gentleman to him) by the classical remains and recollections which you met with in your visit to Ithaca.”—­“You quite mistake me,” answered Lord Byron—­“I have no poetical humbug about me; I am too old for that.  Ideas of that sort are confined to rhyme.”