The great pleasure he took in jesting appears to have belonged to his organization, for it accompanied him throughout life. We have already seen what his nurses, his preceptors, and the friends of his childhood said on this subject. We have observed his sympathy for the old cup-bearer of his family mansion; the pleasantries expended on the quack Lavander, who was always promising to cure his foot, and never did; the jesting tone of his boyish correspondence; afterward the masqueradings that took place at Newstead Abbey; then again his gay doings with Moore and Rogers in London; the jests pervading the correspondence of his maturer years; then their concentration in "Beppo" and "Don Juan;" and finally, how often, even in Greece, when he was already unwell at Missolonghi, he could not help giving way to pleasantry and childish play to such a degree that good Dr. Kennedy, when he wished to convert him to his somewhat intolerant orthodoxy at Cephalonia, found one of the obstacles to consist in the difficulty of keeping Lord Byron serious.
"He was fond," says the doctor, "of saying smart and witty things, and never allowed an opportunity of punning to escape him.... He generally showed high spirits and hilarity.... I have heard him say several witty things; but as I was always anxious to keep him grave and present important subjects for his consideration, after allowing the laugh to pass I again endeavored to resume the seriousness of the conversation, while his lordship constantly did the same."
And then Kennedy adds:—"My impression from them was, that they were unworthy a man of his accomplishments: I mean the desire of jesting."[150]
These words well characterize the honest Methodist, who, like many other good and noble minds, yet could not understand fun. This incapability is also sometimes the case with persons of a sour, ill-natured, or susceptible disposition, whose excessive vanity is shocked at all simple, innocent explosions of gayety and pleasantry.[151] Colonel Stanhope, who knew Lord Byron at the same period, and who was not a Methodist, but who from other causes could not appreciate the poet's vivacious wit, said:—
"The mind of Lord Byron was like a volcano, full of fire and wrath, sometimes calm, often dazzling and playful.... As a companion," he adds, "no one could be more amusing than Lord Byron; he had neither pedantry nor affectation about him, but was natural and playful as a boy. His conversation resembled a stream; sometimes smooth, sometimes rapid, and sometimes rushing down in cataracts. It was a mixture of philosophy and slang, of every thing,—like his 'Don Juan.' He was a patient, and in general a very attentive, listener. When, however, he did engage with earnestness in conversation, his ideas succeeded each other with such uncommon rapidity that he could not control them. They burst from him impetuously; and although he both attended to and noticed the remarks of others, yet he did not allow these to check his discourse for an instant."
"There was usually," writes Count Gamba, his friend and companion in Greece, in his interesting work, entitled "Last Travels of Lord Byron in Greece," "a liveliness of spirit and a tendency to joke, even at times of great danger, when other men would have become serious and pre-occupied. This disposition of mind gave him a kind of air of frankness and sincerity which was quite irresistible with those persons even who were most prejudiced against him."
This allusion of Count Gamba refers to the letter which Byron wrote in the midst of the Suliotes, among whom he had taken refuge during the storm and to escape the Turks.
"If any thing," writes Lord Byron, on the point of embarking for Missolonghi, and in his last letter to Moore, "if any thing in the way of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age of a brother warbler, like Garcilasso de la Vega, I pray you remember me in 'your smiles and wine.'
"I have hopes that the cause will triumph; but, whether it does or no, still 'honor must be minded as strictly as a milk diet.' I trust to observe both.
Byron."