show his polite friends that he had nothing in common with so inconsiderate a plebeian. Mr. Hazlitt is a little too angry with Mr. Moore. He ought to include him

self, who undertook to be still more independent of high life, and who can afford better to be mistaken. A person who knew Mr. Moore well, told me, that asking him one day how he should feel, if the King were to offer to make him a baronet, the author of the "Irish Melodies" replied, "Good God! how these people can annihilate us!" I told this answer to Mr. Hazlitt, who justly admired the candour of it. It would have been more admirable, however, if the poet were to omit those innocent" scoffs at the admirers of lords and titles, with which he sometimes thinks fit to mystify himself: and the philosopher's admiration of candour would be better, if he were always candid himself, and now and then a little. philosophic.

I passed a melancholy time at Albaro, walking about the stony alleys, and thinking of Mr. Shelley. My intercourse with Lord Byron, though less than before, was considerable; and we were always, as the phrase is, "on good terms. He knew what I felt, for I said it. I also knew what he thought, for he said that, "in a manner;" and he was in the habit of giving you a good deal to understand, in what he did not say. In the midst of all his strange conduct, he professed a great personal regard. He would do the most humiliating things, insinuate the bitterest, both of me and my friends, and then affect to do all away with a soft word, protesting that nothing he ever said was meant to apply to myself.

I will take this opportunity of recording some more anecdotes as they occur to me. We used to walk in the grounds of the Casa Saluzzi, talking for the most part of indifferent matters, and endeavouring to joke away the consciousness of our position. We joked even upon our difference of opinion. It was a jest between us, that the only book that was unequivocally a favourite on both sides was Boswell's "Life of Johnson." I used to talk of Johnson when I saw him out of temper, or wished to avoid other subjects. He asked me one day, how I should have felt in Johnson's company. I said it was difficult to judge; because, living in other times and one's character being modified by them, I could not help think

ing of myself as I was now, and Johnson as he was in times previous: so that it appeared to me that I should have been somewhat Jacobinical in his company, and not disposed to put up with his ipse dixits. He said, that "Johnson would have awed him, he treated lords with so much respect." This was better said than it was meant to be, and I have no doubt was very true. Johnson would have made him a bow like a churchwarden; and Lord Byron would have been in a flutter of worshipped acquiescence. He liked to imitate Johnson, and say, "Why, Sir," in a high mouthing way, rising, and looking about him. Yet he hardly seemed to relish Peter Pindar's imitations, excellent as they were. I used to repeat to him those laughable passages out of "Bozzy and Piozzy."

Dear Dr. Johnson,

(It is Mrs. Thrale who speaks)—

"Dear Dr. Johnson was in size an ox,
And of his uncle Andrew learnt to box,
A man to wrestlers and to bruisers dear,

Who kept the ring in Smithfield a whole year.

The Doctor had an uncle too, ador'd

By jumping gentry, called Cornelius Ford;

Who jump'd in boots, which jumpers never choose,

Far as a famous jumper jump'd in shoes.”

See also the next passage in the book

"At supper rose a dialogue on witches,"

which I would quote also, only I am afraid Mr. Moore would think I was trespassing on the privileges of high life. Again; Madame Piozzi says,

"Once at our house, amidst our Attic feast,
We liken'd our acquaintances to beasts:
As for example-some to calves and hogs,
And some to bears and monkeys, cats, and dogs.

We said, (which charm'd the Doctor much, no doubt,)
His mind was like, of elephants the snout;
That could pick pins up, yet possess'd the vigour
Of trimming well the jacket of a tiger."

Bozzy. When Johnson was in Edinburgh, my wife
To please his palate, studied for her life:
With ev'ry rarity she fill'd her house,
And gave the Doctor for his dinner, grouse.

Piozzi. Dear Doctor Johnson left off drinks fermented,
With quarts of chocolate and cream contented;

Yet often down his throat's prodigious gutter,

Poor man! he pour'd whole floods of melted butter."

At these passages, which make me laugh so for the thousandth time, that I can hardly write them, Lord Byron had too invincible a relish of a good thing not to laugh also, but he did it uneasily. The cause is left to the reader's speculation.

With the commiseration about the melted butter, we agreed heartily. When Lord Castlereagh killed himself, it was mentioned in the papers that he had taken his usual tea and buttered toast for breakfast. I said there. was no knowing how far even so little a thing as buttered toast might not have fatally assisted in exasperating that ill state of stomach, which is found to accompany melancholy. As "the last feather breaks the horse's back so the last injury done to the organs of digestion may make a man kill himself. He agreed with me entirely in this; and said the world were as much in the wrong, in nine cases out of ten, respecting the immediate causes of suicide, as they were in their notions about the harmlessness of this and that food, and the quantity of it.

Like many other wise theorists on this subject, he had wilfully shut his eyes to the practice, though I do not mean to say he was excessive in eating and drinking. He had only been in the habit, latterly, of taking too much for his particular temperament; a fault, in one respect, the most pardonable in those who are most aware of it, the uneasiness of a sedentary stomach tempting them to the very indulgence that is hurtful. I know what it is; and beg, in this, as on other occasions, not to be supposed to imply any thing to my own advantage, when I am upon points that may be construed to the disadvantage of others. But he had got fat, and then went to the other extreme. He came to me one day out of another room, and said, with great glee, "Look here! what do you say to this?" at the same time doubling the lapells of his coat one over the other:- -"three months ago, added he, "I could not button it." Sometimes, though 7 rarely, with a desperate payment of his virtue, he would make an outrageous dinner; eating all sorts of things that were unfit for him, and suffering accordingly next day. He once sent to Paris for one of the travelling pies they

make there-things that distribute indigestion by return of post, and cost three or four guineas. Twenty crowns, I think, he gave for it. He tasted, and dined. The next day he was fain to make a present of six-eighths of it to an envoy:-" Lord Byron's compliments, and he sends his Excellency a pasty that has seen the world." He did not write this; but this was implied in his compliment. It is to be hoped his Excellency had met the pasAty before.

It is a credit to my noble acquaintance, that he was by far the pleasantest when he had got wine in his head. The only time I invited myself to dine with him, I told him I did it on that account, and that I meant to push the bottle so, that he should intoxicate me with his good company. He said he would have a set-to; but he never did it. I believe he was afraid. It was a little before he left Italy; and there was a point in contest between us (not regarding myself,) which he thought perhaps I should persuade him to give up. When in his cups, which was not often, nor immoderately, he was inclined to be tender; but not weakly so, nor lachrymose. I know not how it might have been with every body, but he paid me the compliment of being excited to his very best feelings; and when I rose late to go away, he would hold me down, and say, with a look of entreaty, "Not yet." 99 Then it was that I seemed to talk with the proper natural Byron as he ought to have been; and there was not a sacrifice I could not have made to keep him in that temper; and see his friends love him, as much as the world admired. Next morning it was all gone. His intimacy with the worst part of mankind had got him again in its chilling crust; and nothing remained but to despair and joke.

In his wine he would volunteer an imitation of somebody, generally of Incledon. He was not a good mimic in the detail; but he could give a lively broad sketch; and over his cups his imitatations were good-natured, which was seldom the case at other times. His Incledon

was vocal. I made pretensions to the oratorical part; and between us, we boasted that we made up the entire ⚫ phenomenon. Mr. Mathews would have found it defective or rather, he would not; for had he been there, we should judiciously have secreted our pretensions, and

had the true likeness. We just knew enough of the matter, to make proper admirers.

The mention of this imitation makes me recollect under what frightful circumstances of gaiety we returned from performing an office more than usually melancholy on the sea-shore. I dare allow myself only to allude to it. But we dined and drank after it,dined little, and drank much. Lord Byron had not shone that day, even in his cups. For myself, I had bordered upon emotions which I have never suffered myself to indulge, and which foolishly as well as impatiently render calamity, as somebody termed it, "an affront, and not a misfortune." The barouche drove rapidly through the forest of Pisa. We sang, we laughed, we shouted. I even felt a gaiety the more shocking, because it was real, and a relief. What the coachman thought of us, God knows; but he helped to make up a ghastly trio. He was a good-tempered fellow, and an affectionate husband and father; yet he had the reputation of having offered his master to knock a man on the head. I wish to have no such waking dream again. It was worthy of a German ballad.

This servant his Lordship had exalted into something wonderfully attached to him, though he used to fight hard with the man on some points. But alive as he was to the mock-heroic in others, he would commit it with a strange unconscious gravity, where his own importance was concerned. Another servant of his, a great baby of a fellow, with a florid face and huge whiskers, who, with very equivocal symptoms of valour, talked highly about Greece and fighting, and who went strutting about in a hussar dress, and a sword by his side, gave himself, all on a sudden, such ludicrous airs at the door, as his Lordship's porter, that notice was taken of "Poor fellow!" said Lord Byron, "he is too full of his attachment to me. He is a sort of Dolabella!" Thus likening a great simpleton of a footman to the follower of Antony!

it.

"Have you seen my three helmets?" he inquired one day, with an air between hesitation and hurry. Upon being answered in the negative, he said he would show them me, and began to enter a room for that purpose, but stopped short, and put it off to another time. The