"These sort of notes he would secure indiscriminately with wafers or wax, as the case might be.
"One day conversing with him upon the state of Greece, and the great struggle in which we were all engaged, he observed to me, 'that a very small proportion of the population of London had been in the Archipelago.' When I assented, he said—with a sigh which went to my heart, and in a tone which I shall never forget—'It would be very strange if they had.'
"He had a strong antipathy to pork when underdone or stale, and nothing could induce him to partake of fish which had been caught more than ten days—indeed, he had a singular dislike even to the smell of it; some of his observations upon this subject will be given in a new quarto work about to be published by a very eminent bookseller.
"He spoke of Harrow with strong feelings of affection, and of the lovely neighbours of Dr. Bowen—(who they were he carefully concealed from us)—they were tenants of the same house with the late Duke of Dorset, who was Byron's fag. To a lady of the name of Enoch, who lived in a cottage at Roxeth, he had addressed some of his early productions, but had destroyed them. He used to ask me why Mr. Procter called himself Cornwall? 'he might as well call himself Cumberland,' said Byron, with his accustomed acumen.
"It has been remarked that Byron spoke of his own child with affection. Strange and unnatural as this may appear, it is literally the fact. It seems, however, to have excited so much surprise, that it is absolutely necessary to be particular in impressing the truth upon the British nation, who are so deeply interested in everything which relates to the immortal poet departed.
"The poem which he wrote upon the close of his thirty-sixth year has been published and republished so often, that we do not think it worth printing here. But the observation made by its great author to our correspondent is curious and striking:—
"'I have written these verses on closing my thirty-sixth year,' said Byron. 'I was always superstitious—thirty-six is an ominous number—four times nine are thirty-six; three times twelve are thirty-six; the figures thirty-six are three and six—six and three make nine, so do five and four'—he paused and said—'Mrs. Williams, the old lady who told my fortune, is right. The chances are, I shall not live six and thirty years more.' The fact has proved that he was not ungifted with the power of divination.
"Byron died, as I have just said, in his thirty-sixth year. What makes this coincidence the more curious is, that if he had lived till January, 1844, he would have completed his fifty-sixth, a circumstance which, curious as it is, we believe has not been noticed by any of his biographers.
"I once proposed to him to take a companion on a tour he was about to make; he answered me snappishly—'No; Hobhouse once went with me on a tour—I had enough of him. No more travelling companions for me.'