144 — To his Mother
Athens, July 25, 1810.
Dear Mother, — I have arrived here in four days from Constantinople, which is considered as singularly quick, particularly for the season of the year.
I
left Constantinople with Adair, at whose adieux of leave I saw Sultan Mahmout
, and obtained a firman to visit the mosques, of which I gave you a description in my last letter, now voyaging to England in the
Salsette
frigate, in which I visited the plains of Troy and Constantinople. Your northern gentry can have no conception of a Greek summer; which, however, is a perfect frost compared with Malta and Gibraltar, where I reposed myself in the shade last year, after a gentle gallop of four hundred miles, without intermission, through Portugal and Spain. You see, by my date, that I am at Athens again, a place which I think I prefer, upon the whole, to any I have seen.
My next movement is to-morrow into the Morea, where I shall probably remain a month or two, and then return to winter here, if I do not change my plans, which, however, are very variable, as you may suppose; but none of them verge to England.
The
Marquis of Sligo
, my old fellow-collegian, is here, and wishes to accompany me into the Morea. We shall go together for that purpose; but I am woefully sick of travelling companions, after a year's experience of Mr. Hobhouse, who is on his way to Great Britain. Lord S. will afterwards pursue his way to the capital; and Lord B., having seen all the wonders in that quarter, will let you know what he does next, of which at present he is not quite certain. Malta is my perpetual post-office, from which my letters are forwarded to all parts of the habitable globe:— by the bye, I have now been in Asia, Africa, and the east of Europe, and, indeed, made the most of my time, without hurrying over the most interesting scenes of the ancient world. Fletcher, after having been toasted and roasted, and baked, and grilled, and eaten by all sorts of creeping things, begins to philosophise, is grown a refined as well as a resigned character, and promises at his return to become an ornament to his own parish, and a very prominent person in the future family pedigree of the Fletchers, who I take to be Goths by their accomplishments, Greeks by their acuteness, and ancient Saxons by their appetite. He (Fletcher) begs leave to send half-a-dozen sighs to Sally his spouse, and wonders (though I do not) that his ill-written and worse spelt letters have never come to hand; as for that matter, there is no great loss in either of our letters, saving and except that I wish you to know we are well, and warm enough at this present writing, God knows. You must not expect long letters at present, for they are written with the sweat of my brow, I assure you. It is rather singular that Mr. Hanson has not written a syllable since my departure. Your letters I have mostly received as well as others; from which I conjecture that the man of law is either angry or busy.
I trust you like Newstead, and agree with your neighbours; but you know
you
are a
vixen
— is not that a dutiful appellation? Pray, take care of my books and several boxes of papers in the hands of Joseph; and pray leave me a few bottles of champagne to drink, for I am very thirsty; — but I do not insist on the last article, without you like it. I suppose you have your house full of silly women, prating scandalous things. Have you ever received my picture in oil from Sanders, London? It has been paid for these sixteen months: why do you not get it? My suite, consisting of two Turks, two Greeks, a Lutheran, and the nondescript, Fletcher, are making so much noise, that I am glad to sign myself
Yours, etc., etc.,
Byron
.
Footnote 1:
On July 10, 1810, the British ambassador, Robert Adair, had his audience of Sultan Mahmoud II, and on the 14th the
Salsette
set sail. She touched at the island of Zea to land Byron, who thence made his way to Athens.
It was in making war against Mahmoud II, the conqueror of Ali Pasha and the destroyer of the Janissaries, that Byron lost his life. The following description of the Sultan is given by Hobhouse (
Travels in Albania, etc.,
vol. ii. pp. 364, 365):—
"The chamber was small and dark, or rather illumined with a gloomy artificial light, reflected from the ornaments of silver, pearls, and other white brilliants, with which it is thickly studded on every side and on the roof. The throne, which is supposed the richest in the world, is like a four-posted bed, but of a dazzling splendour; the lower part formed of burnished silver and pearls, and the canopy and supporters encrusted with jewels. It is in an awkward position, being in one corner of the room, and close to a fireplace.
"Sultan Mahmoud was placed in the middle of the throne, with his feet upon the ground, which, notwithstanding the common form of squatting upon the hams, seems the seat of ceremony. He was dressed in a robe of yellow satin, with a broad border of the darkest sable; his dagger, and an ornament on his breast, were covered with diamonds; the front of his white and blue turban shone with a large treble sprig of diamonds, which served as a buckle to a high, straight plume of bird-of-paradise feathers. He, for the most part, kept a hand on each knee, and neither moved his body nor head, but rolled his eyes from side to side, without fixing them for an instant upon the ambassador or any other person present. Occasionally he stroked and turned up his beard, displaying a milk-white hand glittering with diamond rings. His eyebrows, eyes, and beard, being of a glossy jet black, did not appear natural, but added to that indescribable majesty which it would be difficult for any but an Oriental sovereign to assume; his face was pale, and regularly formed, except that his nose (contrary to the usual form of that feature in the Ottoman princes) was slightly turned up and pointed; his whole physiognomy was mild and benevolent, but expressive and full of dignity. He appeared of a short and small stature, and about thirty years old, which is somewhat more than his actual age."
Byron, at the audience, claimed some precedence in the procession as a peer. On May 23, 1819, Moore sat at dinner next to Stratford Canning (afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe), who
"gave a ludicrous account of Lord Byron's insisting upon taking precedence of the corps diplomatique in a procession at Constantinople (when Canning was secretary), and upon Adair's refusing it, limping, with as much swagger as he could muster, up the hall, cocking a foreign military hat on his head. He found, however, he was wrong, and wrote a very frank letter acknowledging it, and offering to take his station anywhere"
(
Journals, etc., of Thomas Moore
, vol. ii. p. 313).
An incident of the voyage from Constantinople to Zea is mentioned by Moore (
Life
, p. 110). Picking up a Turkish dagger on the deck, Byron looked at the blade, and then, before replacing it in the sheath, was overheard to say to himself, "I should like to know how a person feels after committing a murder." In
Firmilian; a Spasmodic Tragedy
(scene ix.) the sentiment is parodied. Firmilian determines to murder his friend, in order to shriek "delirious at the taste of sin!" He had already blown up a church full of people; but —
"I must have
A more potential draught of guilt than this
With more of wormwood in it!...
...
Courage, Firmilian! for the hour has come
When thou canst know atrocity indeed,
By smiting him that was thy dearest friend.
And think not that he dies a vulgar death —
'Tis poetry demands the sacrifice!"
And he hurls Haverillo from the summit of the Pillar of St. Simeon Stylites.
Footnote 2:
For Lord Sligo, see page 100,
2. Lord Sligo was at Athens with a 12-gun brig and a crew of fifty men. At Athens, also, were Lady Hester Stanhope and Michael Bruce, on their way through European Turkey. As the party were passing the Piraeus, they saw a man jump from the mole-head into the sea. Lord Sligo, recognizing the bather as Byron, called to him to dress and join them. Thus began what Byron, in his Memoranda, speaks of as "the most delightful acquaintance which I formed in Greece." From Lord Sligo Moore heard the following stories:—
Weakened and thinned by his illness at Patras, Byron returned to Athens. There, 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!'"
He often spoke of his mother to Lord Sligo, who thought that his feeling towards her was 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, pointing to his naked leg and foot, he 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!"
Relics of ancient art only appealed to Byron's imagination among their original and natural surroundings. For collections and collectors he had a contempt which, like everything he thought or felt, was unreservedly expressed. Lord Sligo wished to spend some money in digging for antiquities, and Byron offered to act as his agent, and to see the money honestly applied. "You may safely trust
me
" he said; "I am no dilettante. Your connoisseurs are all thieves; but I care too little for these things ever to steal them."
His system of thinning himself, which he had begun before he left England, was continued abroad. While at Athens, where he stayed at the Franciscan Convent, he took a Turkish bath three times a week, his usual drink being vinegar and water, and his food seldom more than a little rice. The result was that, when he returned to England, he weighed only 9 stone 11-1/2 lbs. (see page 127,
1).
Moore's account of the "cordial friendship" between Byron and Lady Hester Stanhope requires modification. Lady Hester (see page 302,
I) thus referred in after-life to her meeting with Byron, if her physician's recollection is to be trusted (
Memoirs
, by Dr. Meryon, vol. iii. pp. 218, 219) —
"'I think he was a strange character: his generosity was for a motive, his avarice for a motive; one time he was mopish, and nobody was to speak to him; another, he was for being jocular with everybody. Then he was a sort of Don Quixote, fighting with the police for a woman of the town; and then he wanted to make himself something great ... At Athens I saw nothing in him but a well-bred man, like many others; for, as for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as for the thoughts, who knows where he got them? ... He had a great deal of vice in his looks — his eyes set close together, and a contracted brow — so' (imitating it). 'Oh, Lord! I am sure he was not a liberal man, whatever else he might be. The only good thing about his looks was this part' (drawing her hand under the cheek down the front of her neck), 'and the curl on his forehead.'"
Michael Bruce, with the help of Sir Robert Wilson and Capt. Hutchinson, assisted Count Lavallette to escape from Paris in January, 1816. For an account, see Wilson's intercepted letter to Lord Grey (
Memoires du Comte Lavallette
, vol. ii. p. 132) and the story of their trial, conviction, and sentence before the Assize Court of the Department of the Seine (April 22-24, 1816), given in the
Annual Register
for 1816, pp. 329-336.
