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.
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