[73] According to his desire, I waited upon this young lady, having provided myself with a rouleau of fifteen or twenty Napoleons to present to her from his Lordship; but, with a very creditable spirit, my young countrywoman declined the gift, saying that Lord Byron had mistaken the object of her application to him, which was to request that, by allowing her to have the sheets of some of his works before publication, he would enable her to prepare early translations for the French booksellers, and thus afford her the means of acquiring something towards a livelihood.
[74] M. Lamartine.
[75] Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of circumstantial wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene;—his voyages to Sicily,—to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, &c. &c. But the most absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications, are the stories told by Pouqueville, of the poet's religious conferences in the cell of Father Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in which Rizo has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical scene, got up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron and the Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Botzaris, in Missolonghi.
[76] The critic here subjoins the soliloquy from Manfred, beginning "We are the fools of time and terror," in which the allusion to Pausanias occurs.
[77] An Irish phrase for being in a scrape.
[78] The title given him by M. Lamartine, in one of his Poems.
[79] I had congratulated him upon arriving at what Dante calls the "mezzo cammin" of life, the age of thirty-three.
[80] I had mistaken the concluding words of his letter of the 9th of June.
[81] The angry note against English travellers appended to this tragedy, in consequence of an assertion made by some recent tourist, that he (or as it afterwards turned out, she) "had repeatedly declined an introduction to Lord Byron while in Italy."
[82] The paragraph is left thus imperfect in the original.