occurs the following passage:—

"I have been called in as mediator, or second, at least twenty times, in violent quarrels, and have always contrived to settle the business without compromising the honour of the parties, or leading them to mortal consequences, and this, too, sometimes in very difficult and delicate circumstances, and having to deal with very hot and haughty spirits,—Irishmen, gamesters, guardsmen, captains, and cornets of horse, and the like. This was, of course, in my youth, when I lived in hot-headed company. I have had to carry challenges from gentlemen to noblemen, from captains to captains, from lawyers to counsellors, and once from a clergyman to an officer in the Life Guards; but I found the latter by far the most difficult:

'to compose
The bloody duel without blows,'

the business being about a woman: I must add, too, that I never saw a woman behave so ill, like a cold-blooded, heartless b——as she was,—but very handsome for all that. A certain Susan C——was she called. I never saw her but once; and that was to induce her but to say two words (which in no degree compromised herself), and which would have had the effect of saving a priest or a lieutenant of cavalry. She would not say them, and neither Nepean nor myself (the son of Sir Evan Nepean, and a friend to one of the parties) could prevail upon her to say them, though both of us used to deal in some sort with womankind. At last I managed to quiet the combatants without her talisman, and, I believe, to her great disappointment: she was the damnedest b—— that I ever saw, and I have seen a great many. Though my clergyman was sure to lose either his life or his living, he was as warlike as the Bishop of Beauvais, and would hardly be pacified; but then he was in love, and that is a martial passion."

'to compose
The bloody duel without blows,'

One challenge from a gentleman to a nobleman was that of Scrope Davies to Lord Foley, in 1813; but Byron succeeded in arranging the matter. That from a lawyer to a counsellor was in 1815, from John Hanson to Serjeant Best, afterwards Lord Wynford, and arose out of the marriage of Miss Hanson to Lord Portsmouth; this quarrel was also settled by Byron. The case of the clergyman was that of the Rev. Robert Bland, whose mistress, during his absence in Holland, left him for an officer in the Guards (see

Letters

, vol. i. p. 197, end of

note

[Footnote 1 of Letter 102] on Francis Hodgson). Byron was himself a fair shot with a pistol.

"When in London," writes Gronow (Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 152), "Byron used to go to Manton's shooting-gallery, in Davies Street, to try his hand, as he said, at a wafer. Wedderburn Webster was present when the poet, intensely delighted with his own skill, boasted to Joe Manton that he considered himself the best shot in London. 'No, my lord,' replied Manton, 'not the best; but your shooting to-day was respectable.' Whereupon Byron waxed wroth, and left the shop in a violent passion."

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