“Yet are Spain’s maids no race of Amazons,
But formed for all the witching arts of love:”
a story of which the memory is in “Don Juan”:
“’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue
By female lips and eyes—that is I mean,
When both the teacher and the taught are young,
As was the case, at least, where I have been.”
It happened at Seville, where the travellers, as Hobhouse writes, “made the acquaintance of Admiral Cordova, with whose daughter Byron contrived to fall in love at very short notice.”
Admiral Cordova was the Admiral who put up the fight which gained Sir John Jervis the title of Earl Saint Vincent. Byron had an introduction to the family, met Señorita Cordova at the theatre, and was invited to escort her home. It is not quite clear from the correspondence whether it was Señorita Cordova or some other lady who quarrelled with him because he would not give her the ring which he wore, as pledge of his affection; nor is it certain whether the ring was, or was not, a memento of Mary Chaworth. Whatever its origin, it was to be yielded up at the hour of the “passion for a married woman”; and meanwhile there was another little incident of which Byron speaks, of all places in the world, in a letter to his mother:
“We lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies.... The eldest honoured your unworthy son with very particular attention, embracing him with great tenderness at parting ... after cutting off a lock of his hair, and presenting him with one of her own, about three feet in length, which I send and beg you will retain till my return.... She offered me a share of her apartment, which my virtue induced me to decline.”
That is all, and it is of no importance. The next stage was Gibraltar, and it is there, and on the voyage thence to Malta, that we get our first glimpse of Byron from the pen of an observer who observed, not as a matter of course, but as a matter of curiosity, and had a turn for picturesque description.
John Galt, afterwards famous as a Scotch novelist, was at Gibraltar when Byron arrived there. He had been sent to the Levant by a firm of traders to ascertain how far British goods could be exploited in defiance of the Berlin and Milan Decrees. He was to try hard, though in vain, to introduce such goods into the Greek archipelago, and to smuggle them into Spain. Half man of action and half dreamer, he went about denouncing priests and kings, and exhorting the British Government to seize all the islands everywhere for the supposed advantage of British commerce. Byron, condescendingly asking Hodgson to review one of his books favourably, describes him, with more or less of justice, as “a cock-brained man,” and, remembering him at a later date, told Lady Blessington that he “could not awe him into a respect sufficiently profound for my sublime self, either as a peer or an author.”
This means, of course, that Galt, though he perceived the pose, did not abase himself in ecstasy before it. Seeing that he was a man of thirty, whereas Byron was only just of age, it was hardly to be expected that he would. Moreover, as a Scotsman, he would naturally take the side of the Edinburgh and maintain that Byron had done nothing to be conceited about. So he observed Byron—and we may be grateful to him for doing so—in a spirit of criticism and detachment.
“His physiognomy,” Galt writes, “was prepossessing and intelligent, but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then thought, with a degree of affectation in it, probably first assumed for picturesque effect and energetic expression, but which I afterwards discovered was undoubtedly the occasional scowl of some unpleasant recollection: it was certainly disagreeable—forbidding—but still the general cast of his features was impressed with elegance and character.”