person somewhat thin and swarthy, with a high forehead and black curly hair-a stern countenance, and lofty and reserved manners, -perhaps, a black mantle and a diamond-hilted dagger. I thought, moreover, to hear the most common topics of conversation uttered with the purest eloquence, if not in poetry: I was much surprised to find almost the reverse. His manners were altogether without ceremony; his person inclining to fat, and, apparently, effeminate; his complexion delicate, his eyes light blue, or grey, and his hair dark brown, combed smoothly over his forehead and falling with a few curls down about his neck. He was dressed in a sky-blue bombasin or camlet frock coat, with a cape descending over his shoulders, boots and pantaloons, and had, indeed, a considerable deal of the dandy in his appearance.

After some general conversation, in the course of which he talked much of his wrongs and persecutions in England, and observed that either England would not do for him, or he should not do for England; he mentioned the portrait, and was very delicate in ascertaining whether I preferred attending him at Monte Nero, or his coming to me at Leghorn. I wished to leave it entirely to him, but was, in the end, obliged to settle the matter myself; and it was determined that I should go to Monte Nero. We then looked about for a suitable room. Amongst other apartments, we went into a little Catholic chapel, in coming out of which he crossed himself in jest, and said, "A religion generally lasts about two thousand years."

A day or two after was fixed for his first sitting. He expressed regret that he could not keep me at his house altogether, there being a family of friends with him at the time, and his accommodation being very small. He would, however, send a carriage every day to convey me thither.

On the day appointed I arrived at two o'clock, and began the picture. I found him a bad sitter. He talked all the time, and asked a multitude of questions about America-how I liked Italy, what I thought of the Italians, &c. When he was silent, he was a worse sitter than before; for he assumed a countenance which did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for Childe Harold. In about an hour our first sitting terminated, and I returned to Leghorn, scarcely able to persuade myself that this was the haughty misanthrope whose character had always appeared so enveloped in gloom and mystery, for I do not remember ever to have met with manners more gentle and attractive.

The next day I returned and had another sitting of an hour, during which he seemed anxious to know what I should make of my undertaking. Whilst I was painting, the window from which I received my light became suddenly darkened, and I heard a voice exclaim" è troppo bello!" I turned and discovered a beautiful female stooping down to look in, the ground on the outside being on a level with the bottom of the window. Her long, golden hair hung down about her face and shoulders, her complexion was exquisite, and her smile completed one of the most romantic-looking heads, set off as it was by the bright sun behind it, which I had ever beheld. Lord Byron invited her to come in, and introduced her to me as the Countess Guiccioli. He seemed very fond of her, and I was glad of her presence, for the playful manner which he assumed towards her, made him a much better sitter.

I went on the following morning: he never came from his bed-room

until two o'clock. This day, for the first time, he appeared rather gloomy, but soon began to talk in his jocose way, though sometimes a little passionately, when the subject gave him occasion. He had just received a review of his works, supposed to be written by Mr. Jeffrey, who spoke unfavourably of his tragedies, and placed him, in point of genius, below Sir Walter Scott. He complained bitterly, because it was done, he said, under the cloak of friendship. As he gave me the review to read, he added, "I do not know whether to attack him or not; if I do, I know I shall be very savage, but if I can let it pass for three days, I shall forget it. I never think of these things for more than three days, however savage I may be at first."

The next day, I was pleased to find that the progress which I had made in his likeness had given satisfaction, for, when we were alone, he said that he had a particular favour to request of me-would I grant it? I said that I should be happy to oblige him, and he enjoined me to the flattering task of painting the Countess Guiccioli's portrait for him. On the following morning I began it, and, after this, they sat alternately. He gave me the whole history of his connexion with her, and said that he hoped it would last for ever; at any rate, it should not be his fault if it did not: His other attachments had been broken off by no fault of his. In one of our conversations at the dinner-table, at which we always sat by ourselves, he wished to know who was the favourite poet of the Americans. I told him that he himself was, but he seemed to think that I meant to compliment him. He was anxious to procure all the American books he could. I brought him one from Leghorn, written,

I think, by a Miss Wright. In turning it over, shortly afterwards, whilst the Guiccioli was sitting, he came to a passage, wherein it was stated that "Lord Byron was the favourite poet of the Americans." He pointed it out; said, "I see you were not flattering me;" and talked more and more of going to America, a place to which he had frequently alluded before. I advised him to go, and the Guiccioli, who was anxious that he should do so, often desired me privately to urge his Lordship to it. On these occasions he would sometimes laugh at the idea of his becoming an American citizen, and ask me if I thought that they would make him a judge of a ten-pound court. He frequently talked of, and quoted, Washington Irving; particularly his Knickerbocker, and one day, when my friend, who had made me acquainted with him, replied to one of his questions respecting an American whom he had known," that he was a young man of very good family," he answered, "6 you will talk about family, I see, and Knickerbocker says that he is a fortunate man in America who knows his grandfather." He then added more seriously, that, though an Aristocrat by birth and education, he was a firm Republican in principle, and gave his idea of what an American ought to be: spoke of straight-forward simplicity of manners, incorruptibility, deference for customs and governments of other countries, but no affection for them. But he never was serious long, and turned off to his favourite amusement of convicting me of Americanisms, for which he frequently laid traps. Once or twice he caught the word " expect," but expressed discontent that he never could make me say, "I guess."

I once asked him how he ever could have conceived such a scene as that described in his poem called "Darkness." He replied that he wrote it in 1815 at Geneva, where there was a celebrated dark day, on

"is a

which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight. "The best thing I ever wrote," he continued, piece, never published, on the King's visit to Ireland." After a pause to recall it to his memory, he began to repeat it with slow and solemn pathos, but could only remember a few verses of it. Some time after, he gave me a copy of it at his house at Pisa. On the same occasion, he talked much of his writings, and said that he had never felt a turn for poetry until he was seventeen years of age, and probably, but for love, should not have felt it then: perhaps never. He showed me the 6th and 7th (I think) Cantos of Don Juan in manuscript. They were written on large sheets of paper, put together like a schoolboy's copybook. Here and there I observed alterations of words, but seldom of a whole line, and just so, he told me, it was written down at once, and sent off for publication. It was all gin, he said; meaning thereby that he drank nothing but gin when he wrote it. The Guiccioli was present, and said, "She wished my lord would leave off writing that ugly Don Juan." "I cannot give up my Don Juan," he replied; know what I should do without my Don Juan."

"I do not!

At different stages of my picture of the Guiccioli, he appeared to think that I had made her too handsome: on one of which occasions I told him that, in the eyes of a painter, no picture could be so beautiful as the object for which it was meant. He seemed a little surprised at the observation, and said, “Do I not then see with a painter's eye?" Nevertheless, he did not pretend to be much a judge of painting, for he felt no great passion for it, and had never made it his study; though he piqued himself upon his taste in sculpture, and would criticize the works of Bartolini without mercy. As a proof of his light opinion of this artist, he requested, as a particular favour, of Mr. Hobhouse, when he parted with him at Genoa, that he would go to Bartolini's, and break his (Lord B's) bust to pieces. His chief pride, however, was in his judgment of living beauty, of which he was always pleased to talk, saying, that there was nothing on earth which he prized more than the love of a beautiful woman.

I was by this time sufficiently intimate with him to answer his ques tion as to what I thought of him before I had seen him. He laughed much at the idea which I had formed of him, and said, "Well, you find me like other people, do you not?" He often afterwards repeated, "And so you thought me a finer fellow, did you?" I remember once telling him, that notwithstanding his vivacity, I thought myself correct in at least one estimate which I had made of him, for I still conceived that he was not a happy man. He inquired earnestly what reason I had for thinking so, and I asked him if he had never observed in little children, after a paroxysm of grief, that they had at intervals a convulsive or tremulous manner of drawing in a long breath. Wherever I had observed this, in persons of whatever age, I had always found that it came from sorrow. He said the thought was new to him, and that he would make use of it.

Of Lord Byron's usual mode of passing his time, I was prevented, by the business which I had in hand, from making much observation. I only know he had in the harbour of Leghorn, a yacht which he called the Bollivar, and which was a constant source of trouble to him. The police were much exasperated by such an avowal of republican principles, and would not suffer the vessel to sail out of the port and

return without undergoing quarantine, whilst fishing-smacks were pass.. ing and repassing unmolested. He gave as a reason for persisting in his provocation, that Bollivar might be named with Washington, as far as he had gone, and that he hated the Holy Alliance. This subject once led him on to a discourse upon the last war between England and the United States, and, backward as I was to enter upon any thing like argument with him, I could not help being very eager to correct some dreadful mistakes in his representations. He laughed at the success of his stratagem, and exclaimed, "I thought I should get your American blood up! That was all I wanted."

I had nearly finished both the heads, when, one day, as the Guiccioli was sitting, with Lord Byron and Count Gamba in the room, a man servant rushed in, pale with terror, and said that (whatever his name was) was pursuing him to kill him. They thought that it was only some trifling quarrel amongst the servants, and Count Gamba went out alone to see what was the matter. In a few moments we heard the screaming of a female, and, on hastening into the hall, beheld Count Gamba with a pistol in each hand, and covered with blood. The Guiccioli was greatly agitated, and rushed to prevent her brother from going into the yard; then seized hold of Lord Byron; then turned to me and entreated me not to desert them, for that they were all going to be murdered. This was, indeed, a very natural supposition, for their lives had often been threatened in anonymous letters, and the present disturbance did not seem unlike a conspiracy to carry those threats into effect. Count Gamba, it appeared, had met the infuriated Italian, who, striking every thing with his knife at random, happened to wound him slightly in the face. The Count turned, and ran up-stairs for his pistols: coming down with which he encountered a maid-servant, who had given us the alarm.

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We had some difficulty in preventing Lord Byron, who likewise armed himself with a pistol, from going forth. He said, You see I am quite cool-I only mean to defend myself;" but it was at last decided that we should collect all the fire-arms in the house, which were not a few, and bar the doors, till we could procure assistance from the town. Nothing farther, however, occurred until the next day, when, as Lord Byron was sitting to me, a soldier came, according to the usual practice of Italian justice, which appears to find that the best mode of settling disputes is to punish both parties, with an order for the Gamba family to leave Tuscany.

Lord Byron, and all the party, left Villa Rossa (the name of their house) in a few days, to pack up their things in their house at Pisa. He told me that he should remain a few days there, and desired me, if I could do any thing more to the pictures, to come and stay with him. He seemed at a loss where to go, and was, I thought, on the point of embarking for America. I was with him at Pisa for a few days, but he was so annoyed by the police, and the weather was so hot, that I thought it doubtful whether I could improve the pictures, and, taking my, departure one morning before he was up, I wrote him an excuse from Leghorn. Upon the whole, I left him with an impression that he possessed an excellent heart, which had been misconstrued on all hands from little else than a reckless levity of manners, which he took a whimsical pride in opposing to those of other people.

WALKS IN ROME AND ITS ENVIRONS. NO. 1.

I HAD spent a most agreeable summer at Florence, and should probably have been induced to continue there for the winter, had I not had the fortune (good or bad) to meet with a friend, who was on his way, during the Law vacation, from England direct to Rome. I am rather of a bilious temperament, not indeed of that " splendid bile" of the poet, which flashes from the eye and colours up into the cheek at the slightest friction, but of that moré dull, dun, melancholic cast, which abhors locomotion, and will take up with the same room, chair, and book for weeks together, without the least approach to fidget, or the slightest suspiration after a change. On the contrary, I grow gradually into the habits of the things and people with whom I happen to be surrounded, and root myself as naturally in whatever soil I may chance to be cast, as if I had begun there "ab ovo,' or was intended to remain there for the rest of my life. The activity of my friends indeed occasionally shakes me from these reveries and stagnations; I rub my eyes, get up, and, as long as the motive lasts, there is no recurrence of the disease. It was in one of these propitious moments of electricity, I believe, that 1 took the vigorous resolution of paying off my bile: gathering up my books, and embarking with my friend in his Vienne caritelle at the hotel of the Quatre Nations at Florence, I consoled myself that I was about to advance to the South and not to the North, and before I had quite finished some exclamations from Dante, found myself, after having passed through the Porta Romana, incontestably, out of the city, and on the high road to Rome.

I should have taken, no doubt, very minute notes on my way through Tuscany, had I not travelled by night, and slept or dozed very nearly the whole time. This, I am aware, is no bar to description: if every one was obliged to see with his own eyes, and not through the spectacles of others, we should probably be confined, in much too many cases, to the inside and outside of inns; but as it is, I happen to have a conscience, though I have travelled, and limit myself, from indolence perhaps as much as any other motive, merely to truth and fact. My post-book and post-boy told me that I had passed Sienna, Acquapendente, Bolleno, Viterbo, without any remarkable adventure; and any thing which I may have seen after the last-mentioned town, though it were in broad daylight, I deem totally unworthy of the reader's attention and my own. I remember indeed that at Baccano we had the misfortune to be delayed for want of horses, two mortal hours; but as Alfieri endured the same grievance, or something very like it, in the same place, "homunculi" had no reason to complain. We stretched out like him upon the table, apprehensive of the malaria of the beds; and recited with all the spleen we could muster, and we had been secreting a tolerable quantity since our arrival in the "Stati Pontifieci," the celebrated "Vuoto insalubre regione," &c.—the very essential of every thing acid, which has been ever said, or can be said, against Rome.

we

We got off about four, the weather rather scirocco, and phlegmatic, for so brilliant a period of the year, as the month of the Vindemia and the Villigiatura, but the autumnal visitations of rain and storm were scarcely yet over, and now and then we pressed too closely upon them in their retreat. The road was heavy, the horses "prets à faire leur testament," and our impatience increasing at every mile. "When shall we see the Cupola, when shall we see St. Peter's-il nostro beato San Piero ?" was our incessant exclamation, till we had gradually reached the summit of the Tufo gorge, at a little distance from Baccano, from which travellers, who travel as they should do, have generally pointed out to them by patriotic postilions the wonders which await them at some twenty or thirty miles below. Our guide left his affections elsewhere, and we awaited in vain the important Ecco! which was to be the signal of our enthusiasm, to unsluice all our emotions, and to draw the veil for the first time from the wonder of modern wonders-the March. VOL. XVI. NO. LXIII.

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