For Lord Sligo, see page 100,
2. Lord Sligo was at Athens with a 12-gun brig and a crew of fifty men. At Athens, also, were Lady Hester Stanhope and Michael Bruce, on their way through European Turkey. As the party were passing the Piraeus, they saw a man jump from the mole-head into the sea. Lord Sligo, recognizing the bather as Byron, called to him to dress and join them. Thus began what Byron, in his Memoranda, speaks of as "the most delightful acquaintance which I formed in Greece." From Lord Sligo Moore heard the following stories:—
Weakened and thinned by his illness at Patras, Byron returned to Athens. There, 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!'"
He often spoke of his mother to Lord Sligo, who thought that his feeling towards her was 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, pointing to his naked leg and foot, he 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!"
Relics of ancient art only appealed to Byron's imagination among their original and natural surroundings. For collections and collectors he had a contempt which, like everything he thought or felt, was unreservedly expressed. Lord Sligo wished to spend some money in digging for antiquities, and Byron offered to act as his agent, and to see the money honestly applied. "You may safely trust
me
" he said; "I am no dilettante. Your connoisseurs are all thieves; but I care too little for these things ever to steal them."