He was a good deal weakened and thinned by his illness at Patras, and,
on his return to Athens, standing one day before a looking-glass, he
said to Lord Sligo--"How pale I look!--I should like, I think, to die
of a consumption."--"Why of a consumption?" asked his friend. "Because
then (he answered) the women would all say, 'See that poor Byron--how
interesting he looks in dying!'" In this anecdote,--which, slight as
it is, the relater remembered, as a proof of the poet's consciousness
of his own beauty,--may be traced also the habitual reference of his
imagination to that sex, which, however he affected to despise it,
influenced, more or less, the flow and colour of all his thoughts.
He spoke often of his mother to Lord Sligo, and with a feeling that
seemed little short of aversion. "Some time or other," he said, "I
will tell you _why_ I feel thus towards her."--A few days after, when
they were bathing together in the Gulf of Lepanto, he referred to this
promise, and, pointing to his naked leg and foot, exclaimed--"Look
there!--it is to her false delicacy at my birth I owe that deformity;
and yet, as long as I can remember, she has never ceased to taunt and
reproach me with it. Even a few days before we parted, for the last
time, on my leaving England, she, in one of her fits of passion,
uttered an imprecation upon me, praying that I might prove as ill
formed in mind as I am in body!" His look and manner, in relating this
frightful circumstance, can be conceived only by those who have ever
seen him in a similar state of excitement.
The little value he had for those relics of ancient art, in pursuit of
which he saw all his classic fellow-travellers so ardent, was, like
every thing he ever thought or felt, unreservedly avowed by him. Lord
Sligo having it in contemplation to expend some money in digging for
antiquities, Lord Byron, in offering to act as his agent, and to see
the money, at least, honestly applied, said--"You may safely trust
_me_--I am no dilettante. Your connoisseurs are all thieves; but I
care too little for these things ever to steal them."
The system of thinning himself, which he had begun before he left
England, was continued still more rigidly abroad. While at Athens, he
took the hot bath for this purpose, three times a week,--his usual
drink being vinegar and water, and his food seldom more than a little
rice.
Among the persons, besides Lord Sligo, whom he saw most of at this
time, were Lady Hester Stanhope and Mr. Bruce. One of the first
objects, indeed, that met the eyes of these two distinguished
travellers, on their approaching the coast of Attica, was Lord Byron,
disporting in his favourite element under the rocks of Cape Colonna.
They were afterwards made acquainted with each other by Lord Sligo;
and it was in the course, I believe, of their first interview, at his
table, that Lady Hester, with that lively eloquence for which she is
so remarkable, took the poet briskly to task for the depreciating
opinion, which, as she understood, he entertained of all female
intellect. Being but little inclined, were he even able, to sustain
such a heresy, against one who was in her own person such an
irresistible refutation of it, Lord Byron had no other refuge from the
fair orator's arguments than in assent and silence; and this well-bred
deference being, in a sensible woman's eyes, equivalent to concession,
they became, from thenceforward, most cordial friends. In recalling
some recollections of this period in his "Memoranda," after relating
the circumstance of his being caught bathing by an English party at
Sunium, he added, "This was the beginning of the most delightful
acquaintance which I formed in Greece." He then went on to assure Mr.
Bruce, if ever those pages should meet his eyes, that the days they
had passed together at Athens were remembered by him with pleasure.
During this period of his stay in Greece, we find him forming one of
those extraordinary friendships,--if attachment to persons so inferior
to himself can be called by that name,--of which I have already
mentioned two or three instances in his younger days, and in which the
pride of being a protector, and the pleasure of exciting gratitude,
seem to have constituted to his mind the chief, pervading charm. The
person, whom he now adopted in this manner, and from similar feelings
to those which had inspired his early attachments to the cottage-boy
near Newstead, and the young chorister at Cambridge, was a Greek
youth, named Nicolo Giraud, the son, I believe, of a widow lady, in
whose house the artist Lusieri lodged. In this young man he appears to
have taken the most lively, and even brotherly, interest;--so much so,
as not only to have presented to him, on their parting, at Malta, a
considerable sum of money, but to have subsequently designed for him,
as the reader will learn, a still more munificent, as well as
permanent, provision.
Though he occasionally made excursions through Attica and the Morea,
his head-quarters were fixed at Athens, where he had taken lodgings in
a Franciscan convent, and, in the intervals of his tours, employed
himself in collecting materials for those notices on the state of
modern Greece which he has appended to the second Canto of Childe
Harold. In this retreat, also, as if in utter defiance of the "genius
loci," he wrote his "Hints from Horace,"--a Satire which, impregnated
as it is with London life from beginning to end, bears the date,
"Athens, Capuchin Convent, March 12. 1811."
From the few remaining letters addressed to his mother, I shall
content myself with selecting the two following:--