[149] In 1761 he was even bankrupt. Cf. British Museum. Add. MS. 36,191, f. 8.
[150] Theodore Hook is the original of “Lucian Gay” in Coningsby.
[151] His acquaintance seems to have been made through “Platonist Taylor,” who gave literary symposia.
[152] In Spain he rescued a lady from robbers. On the Ægean he armed and drilled the crew against pirates. In Palestine, with difficulty and courage, he forced his way into the Mosque of Omar. In Egypt a pacha asked him to draft a constitution.
[153] Cf. British Museum Add. MS. 34,616, f. 45. I have referred to this in Chapter I.
[154] “Sure you were to find yourself surrounded by celebrities, and men were welcomed there if they were clever, before they were famous, which showed it was a house that regarded intellect, and did not seek merely to gratify its vanity by being surrounded by the distinguished.”—Coningsby.
[155] Vivian Grey.
[156] He liked to descant on the fast-fading and now vanished political Salon. That of “Lady St. Julians,” who “was not likely to forget her friends,” will be recalled by perusers of Sybil. In a Glasgow speech—recently revived by an evening journal—he praised, with admiration, Lady Palmerston’s, where diplomatists, at loggerheads with the minister, could meet him in the neutral zone of his gifted wife’s catholic hospitality.
[157] “Great as might have been the original errors of Herbert ... they might, in the first instance, be traced rather to a perverted view of society than of himself.”
[158] Byron also figures in Ixion. “All is mystery, and all is gloom, and ever and anon, from out the clouds a star breaks forth and glitters, and that star is Poetry.”