The best account of Byron at this time is that which his friend Hoppner, the British Consul, a son of the painter, wrote to Murray.  Hoppner not only saw Byron regularly at night, but used to ride with him on the Lido.  “The spot,” he says, “where we usually mounted our horses had been a Jewish cemetery; but the French, during their occupation of Venice, had thrown down the enclosure, and levelled all the tombstones with the ground, in order that they might not interfere with the fortifications upon the Lido, under the guns of which it was situated.  To this place, as it was known to be that where he alighted from his gondola and met his horses, the curious amongst our country-people, who were anxious to obtain a glimpse of him, used to resort; and it was amusing in the extreme to witness the excessive coolness with which ladies, as well as gentlemen, would advance within a very few paces of him, eyeing him, some with their glasses, as they would have done a statue in a museum, or the wild beasts at Exeter ’Change.  However flattering this might be to a man’s vanity, Lord Byron, though he bore it very patiently, expressed himself, as I believe he really was, excessively annoyed at it.

“The curiosity that was expressed by all classes of travellers to see him, and the eagerness with which they endeavoured to pick up any anecdotes of his mode of life, were carried to a length which will hardly be credited.  It formed the chief subject of their inquiries of the gondoliers who conveyed them from terra firma to the floating city; and these people who are generally loquacious, were not at all backward in administering to the taste and humours of their passengers, relating to them the most extravagant and often unfounded stories.  They took care to point out the house where he lived, and to give such hints of his movements as might afford them an opportunity of seeing him.

“Many of the English visitors, under pretext of seeing his house, in which there were no paintings of any consequence, nor, besides himself, anything worthy of notice, contrived to obtain admittance through the cupidity of his servants, and with the most barefaced impudence forced their way even into his bedroom, in the hopes of seeing him.  Hence arose, in a great measure, his bitterness towards them, which he has expressed in a note to one of his poems, on the occasion of some unfounded remark made upon him by an anonymous traveller in Italy; and it certainly appears well calculated to foster that cynicism which prevails in his latter works more particularly, and which, as well as the misanthropical expressions that occur in those which first raised his reputation, I do not believe to have been his natural feeling.  Of this I am certain, that I never witnessed greater kindness than in Lord Byron.”