his. He evidently hoped to have the pleasure of adding me to the list; and finding, when we pushed forward, that there was nothing particular in the spectacle of my horsemanship, he said in a tone of disappointment," Why, Hunt, you ride very well!" Trelawney sometimes went with us, on a great horse, smoking a cigar. We had blue frock-coats, white waistcoats and trowsers, and velvet caps à la Raphael; and cut a gallant figure. Sometimes we went as far as a vineyard, where he had been accustomed to shoot at a mark, and where the brunette lived, who came into his drawingroom with the basket of flowers. The father was an honest-looking man, who was in trouble with his landlord, and heaved great sighs; the mother a loud swarthy woman, with hard lines in her face. There was a little sister, delicatelooking and melancholy, very different from the confident though not unpleasing countenance of the elder, who was more handsome. They all, however, seemed good-humoured. We sat under an arbour, and had figs served up to us, the mother being loud in our faces, and cutting some extraordinary jokes, which

made me any thing but merry. Upon the whole, I was glad to come away.

Madame Guiccioli was very curious on these occasions, but could get no information. Unfortunately, she could not see beyond a commonplace of any sort, nor put up with a distressing one in the hope of doing it away. The worst thing she did (and which showed to every body else, though not to herself, that she entertained no real love for Lord Byron) was to indulge in vehement complaints of him to his acquaintances. The first time she did so to me, I shocked her so excessively with endeavouring to pay a compliment to her understanding, and leading her into a more generous policy, that she never made me her confidant again. "No wonder," she said, "that my Lord was so bad, when he had friends who could talk so shockingly." "Oh, Shelley!" thought I, "see what your friend has come to with the sentimental Italian whom he was to assist in reforming our Don Juan!" When Lord Byron talked freely to her before others, she was not affected by what would have startled a delicate Englishwoman, (a com

mon Italian defect), but when he alluded to any thing more pardonable, she would get angry, and remonstrate, and "wonder at him;" he all the while looking as if he enjoyed her vehemence, and did not believe a word of it. A delicate lover would have spared her this, and at the same time have elevated her notions of the behaviour suitable for such occasions; but her own understanding did not inform her any better; and in this respect I doubt whether Lord Byron's could have supplied it; what is called sentiment having been so completely taken out of him by ill company and the world.

Of an evening I seldom saw him. He recreated himself in the balcony, or with a book; and at night, when I went to bed, he was just thinking of setting to work with Don Juan. His favourite reading was history and travels. I think I am correct in saying that his favourite authors were Bayle and Gibbon. Gibbon was altogether a writer calculated to please him. There was a show in him, and at the same time a tone of the world, a self-complacency and a sarcasm, a love of things aristocratical, with a tendency to be liberal on other

points of opinion, and to crown all, a splendid success in authorship, and a high and piquant character with the fashionable world, which found a strong sympathy in the bosom of his noble reader. Then, in his private life, Gibbon was a voluptuous recluse; he had given celebrity to a foreign residence, possessed a due sense of the merits of wealth as well as rank, and last, perhaps not least, was no speaker in Parliament. I may add, that the elaborate style of his writing pleased the lover of the artificial in poetry, while the cynical turn of his satire amused the genius of Don Juan. And finally, his learning and research supplied the indolent man of letters with the information which he had left at school.

Lord Byron's collection of books was poor, and consisted chiefly of new ones. I remember little among them but the English works published at Basle, (Kames, Robertson, Watson's History of Philip II. &c.) and new ones occasionally sent him from England. He was anxious to show you that he possessed no Shakspeare and Milton; " because," he said, "he had been accused of borrowing from them!"

He affected to doubt whether Shakspeare was so great a genius as he has been taken for, and whether fashion had not a great deal to do with it; an extravagance, of which none but a patrician author could have been guilty. However, there was a greater committal of himself at the bottom of this notion than he supposed; and, perhaps, circumstances had really disenabled him from having the proper idea of Shakspeare, though it could not have fallen so short of the truth as he pretended. Spenser he could not read; at least he said so. All All the gusto of that most poetical of the poets

went with him for nothing. I lent him a volume of the " Fairy Queen," and he said he would try to like it. Next day he brought it to my study-window, and said, "Here, Hunt, here is your Spenser. I cannot see any thing in him" and he seemed anxious that I should take it out of his hands, as if he was afraid of being accused of copying so poor a writer. That he saw nothing in Spenser is not very likely; but I really do not think that he saw much. Spenser was too much out of the world, and he too much in it. It would have

See

Fancy"