SIR HUMPHRY DAVY.

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me something to dye my eyebrows black. I have tried a thousand things, and the colours all come off; and besides, they don't grow can't he invent something to make them grow?" All this with the greatest earnestness; and what you will be surprised at, she is neither ignorant nor a fool, but really well educated and clever. But they speak like children, when first out of their convents; and, after all, this is better than an English blue-stocking.

I did not tell Sir Humphry of this last piece of philosophy, not knowing how he might take it. Davy was much taken with Ravenna, and the PRIMITIVE Italianism of the people, who are unused to foreigners: but he only staid a day.

1820.

CURRAN.

CURRAN! Curran's the man who struck me most. Such imagination! there never was anything like it that ever I saw or heard of. His published life-his published speeches, give you no idea of the man-none at all. He was a machine of imagination, as some one said that Piron was an epigrammatic machine.

I did not see a great deal of Curran-only in 1813; but I met him at home, (for he used to call on me), and in society, at Mackintosh's, Holland-House, &c. &c.—and he was wonderful

even to me, who had seen many remarkable men of the time.

The riches of his Irish imagination were exhaustless. I have heard that man speak more poetry than I have ever seen written,— though I saw him seldom, and but occasionally. I saw him presented to Madame de Staël, at Mackintosh's; it was the grand confluence between the Rhone and the Saone, and they were both so ugly that I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken up respectively such residences.

CHAUCER.

CHAUCER, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible-he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Piers Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune.

1807.

HIS LAMENESS.

ONE of the most striking passages in the few pages of that Memoir which related to his early days, was where, in speaking of his own sensitiveness, on the subject of his deformed foot, he described the feeling of horror and humiliation that came over him, when his mother, in one

HIS LAMENESS.

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of her fits of passion, called him "a lame brat." As all that he had felt strongly through life was, in some shape or other, reproduced in his poetry, it was not likely that an expression such as this should fail of being recorded. Accordingly we find, in the opening of his drama, "The Deformed Transformed,"

Arnold. I was born so, mother!"

It may be questioned, indeed, whether that whole drama was not indebted for its origin to this single recollection.

EARLY ATTACHMENT.

I HAVE been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff. How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word. And the effect! -My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. Coe.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convul

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EARLY ATTACHMENT.

sions, and alarmed my mother so much, that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject to me and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance. Now, what could this be? I had never seen her since her mother's faux-pas at Aberdeen had been the cause of her removal to her grandmother's at Banff; we were both the merest children. I had and have been attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet me. Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write for myself, became my secretary. I remember, too, our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their house not far from the Plainstones at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister Helen played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love in our way.

1813.

ORIGINALITY.

To be perfectly original, one should think much and read little; and this is impossible, as one must have read much before one learns to think; for I have no faith in innate ideas, whatever I may have of innate predispositions.

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But after one has laid in a tolerable stock of materials for thinking, I should think the best plan would be to give the mind time to digest it, and then turn it all well over by thought and reflection, by which we make the knowledge acquired our own; and on this foundation we may let our originality (if we have any) build a superstructure, and if not, it supplies our want of it, to a certain degree.

1823.

LIFE.

If I were to live over again, I do not know what I would change in my life, unless it were for-not to have lived at all. All history, and experience, and the rest, teaches us that the good and evil are pretty equally balanced in this existence, and that what is most to be desired is an easy passage out of it. What can it give us but years? and those have little of good but their ending.

THE PRINCE REGENT.

THE other night, at a ball, I was presented by order to our gracious Regent, who honoured me with some conversation, and professed a predilection for poetry.-I confess it was a most unexpected honour, and I thought of poor