At Athens, too, Byron met his old Cambridge acquaintance, Lord Sligo, from whom we obtain, through Moore, some further glimpses at his manner of life and characteristic affectations. He was once more, it seems, constrained to combat the flesh by means of self-denying ordinances, and, to that end, took three Turkish baths a week, and confined himself to a diet of rice and vinegar and water. This system, and a fever contracted at Patras, made him very pale; and he felt that to be pale was to be interesting.
“Standing one day before a looking glass,” Moore tells us, “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, ‘all the women would say, “See that poor Byron—how interesting he looks in dying!”’”
But that is another of the stories which throw at least as much light on the reporter as on the reported. Lord Sligo, no doubt, was the sort of healthy, wooden-headed young Philistine on whom it is a joy to test the effect of such remarks. Byron, in thus posing for him, was, so to say, “trying it on the dog.” There is no such foolishness in his correspondence with those whom he regarded as his intellectual equals, and one cannot conclude the account of his travels better than by quoting his summary of their moral effect contained in a letter to Hodgson:
“I hope you will find me an altered personage—I do not mean in body but in manner, for I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do in this damned world. I am tolerably sick of vice, which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, and mean, on my return, to cut all my dissolute acquaintance, leave off wine and carnal company, and betake myself to politics and decorum.”
To what extent, and within what limits, he carried out these good resolutions, we shall observe as we proceed.