‘I was not antiquary enough to know to what object of antiquity our visit was made, but I saw Lord Byron in earnest conversation with a very antique old Greek monk in full clerical habit. He was a Bishop, sitting oil a stone of the ruined wall close by, and he turned out to be the Esprit fort mentioned in a note at the end of the second canto of “Childe Harold”—a freethinker, at least a freespeaker, when he called the sacrifice of the Maso una Coglioneria.
‘When we embarked on our return to Vathi, Lord Byron seemed moody and sullen, but brightened up as he saw a ripple on the water, a mast and sail raised in the cutter, and Trelawny seated in the stern with the tiller in hand. In a few minutes we were scudding, gunwale under, in a position infinitely more beautiful than agreeable to landsmen, and Lord Byron obviously enjoying the not improbable idea of a swim for life. His motions, as he sat, tended to increase the impulse of the breeze, and tended also to sway the boat to leeward. “I don’t know,” he said, “if you all swim, gentlemen; but if you do, you will have fifty fathoms of blue water to support you; and if you do not, you will have it over you. But as you may not all be prepared, starboard, Trelawny—bring her up. There! she is trim; and now let us have a glass of grog after the gale. Tita, i fiaschi!” This was followed by a reproduction of the gin-and-water jars, and a round of the immortal swizzle. To my very great surprise, it was new to the company that the liquor which they were enjoying was the product of Scotland, in the shape of what is called “low-wines,” or semi-distilled whisky—chiefly from the distillery of mine ancient friend, James Haig of Lochrin; but the communication seemed to gratify the noble drinker, and led to the recitation by one of the company, in pure lowland Scotch, of Burns’s Petition to the House of Commons in behalf of the national liquor. The last stanza, beginning
‘“Scotland, my auld respeckit mither,”
very much pleased Lord Byron, who said that he too was more than half a Scotchman.
‘The conversation again turned on the “Waverley Novels,” and on this occasion Lord Byron spoke of “The Bride of Lammermoor,” and cited the passage where the mother of the cooper’s wife tells her husband (the cooper) that she “kent naething aboot what he might do to his wife; but the deil a finger shall ye lay on my dochter, and that ye may foond upon.” Shortly afterwards, the conversation having turned upon poetry, his lordship mentioned the famous ode on the death of Sir John Moore as the finest piece of poetry in any language. He recited some lines of it. One of the company, with more presumption than wisdom, took him up, as his memory seemed to lag, by filling in the line:
‘“And he looked like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.”
‘Lord Byron, with a look at the interloper that spoke as if death were in it, and no death was sufficiently cruel for him, shouted, “He lay—he lay like a warrior, not he looked.” The pretender was struck dumb, but, with reference to his lordship’s laudation of the piece, he ventured half to whisper that the “Gladiator” was superior to it, as it is to any poetical picture ever painted in words. The reply was a benign look, and a flattering recognition, by a little applausive tapping of his tobacco-box on the board on which he sat.
‘On arriving at Vathi, we repaired to our several rooms in the worthy citizens’ houses where we were billeted, to read and meditate, and write and converse, as we might meet, indoors or out; and much profound lucubration took place among us, on the characteristics and disposition of the very eminent personage with whom we were for the time associated. Dr. Scott, the assistant-surgeon of the 8th Foot, who had heard of, though he may not have witnessed, any of the peculiarities of the great poet, accounted for them, and even for the sublimities of his poetry, by an abnormal construction or chronic derangement of the digestive organs—a theory which experience and observation of other people than poets afford many reasons to support:
‘“Is it not strange now—ten times strange—to think,
And is it not enough one’s faith to shatter,
That right or wrong direction of a drink,
A plus or minus of a yellow matter,
One half the world should elevate or sink
To bliss or woe (most commonly the latter)—
That human happiness is well-formed chyle,
And human misery redundant bile!”
‘The next morning the accounts we heard of Lord Byron were contradictory: Trelawny, who slept in the next room to him, stating that he had been writing the greater part of the night, and he alleged it was the sixteenth canto of “Don Juan”; and Dr. Bruno, who visited him at intervals, and was many hours in personal attendance at his bedside, asserting that he had been seriously ill, and had been saved only by those benedette pillule which so often had had that effect. His lordship again appeared rowing in from his bath at the Lazzaretto, a course of proceeding (bathing and boating) which caused Dr. Bruno to wring his hands and tear his hair with alarm and vexation.