Though like Count Lara now return'd alone
From other lands, almost a stranger grown."
The 9th section of canto 1. is a description of Byron himself at Newstead (the two poems are merely vehicles of their authors' own feelings), with the celebrated skull, since made into a drinking cup, beside him. The succeeding section is a picture of "our own dear lake." That Medora was a gentlewoman, and not from the slave-market, is shown by Conrad's appreciation of her in the 12th section of the first canto of the "Corsair;" and why not formerly beloved by Ezzelin, and thus alluded to by him in the quarrel scene?
"And deem'st thou me unknown too? Gaze again!
At least thy memory was not given in vain,
Oh! never canst thou cancel half her debt,
Eternity forbids thee to forget."
The accents, muttered in a foreign tongue by Lara, on recovering from his swoon in the gallery,—
"And meant to meet an ear
That hears him not—alas! that cannot hear"—