Meanwhile Byron had again retired to Newstead, where he invited some
choice spirits to hold a few weeks of farewell revel. Matthews, one of
these, gives an account of the place, and the time they spent
there--entering the mansion between a bear and a wolf, amid a salvo of
pistol-shots; sitting up to all hours, talking politics, philosophy,
poetry; hearing stories of the dead lords, and the ghost of the Black
Brother; drinking their wine out of the skull cup which the owner had made
out of the cranium of some old monk dug up in the garden; breakfasting at
two, then reading, fencing, riding, cricketing, sailing on the lake, and
playing with the bear or teasing the wolf. The party broke up without
having made themselves responsible for any of the orgies of which Childe
Harold raves, and which Dallas in good earnest accepts as veracious, when
the poet and his friend Hobhouse started for Falmouth, on their way
"_outre mer_."
CHAPTER IV.
TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL.
There is no romance of Munchausen or Dumas more marvellous than the
adventures attributed to Lord Byron abroad. Attached to his first
expedition are a series of narratives, by professing eye-witnesses, of his
intrigues, encounters, acts of diablerie and of munificence, in particular
of his roaming about the isles of Greece and taking possession of one of
them, which have all the same relation to reality as the _Arabian Nights_
to the actual reign of Haroun Al Raschid.
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