the few remaining shillings they were worth, what doth my friend D——­ do?  Why, before the fire was out, he writes a note to Tom Sheridan, the manager of this combustible concern, to enquire whether this farce was not converted into fuel, with about two thousand other unactable manuscripts, which of course were in great peril, if not actually consumed.  Now was not this characteristic?—­the ruling passions of Pope are nothing to it.  Whilst the poor distracted manager was bewailing the loss of a building only worth 300,000 l., together with some twenty thousand pounds of rags and tinsel in the tiring rooms, Bluebeard’s elephants, and all that—­in comes a note from a scorching author, requiring at his hands two acts and odd scenes of a farce!!

“Dear H., remind Drury that I am his well-wisher, and let Scrope Davies be well affected towards me.  I look forward to meeting you at Newstead, and renewing our old champagne evenings with all the glee of anticipation.  I have written by every opportunity, and expect responses as regular as those of the liturgy, and somewhat longer.  As it is impossible for a man in his senses to hope for happy days, let us at least look forward to merry ones, which come nearest to the other in appearance, if not in reality; and in such expectations,

I remain,” &c.

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!’” In this anecdote,—­which, slight as it is, the relater remembered, as a proof of the poet’s consciousness of his own beauty,—­may be traced also the habitual reference of his imagination to that sex, which, however he affected to despise it, influenced, more or less, the flow and colour of all his thoughts.

He spoke often of his mother to Lord Sligo, 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.