with indifferent persons he displayed a curious alternation of
frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit of letting people up and down,
by which he frequently gave offence. More interesting are narratives of
the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in _Don Juan_,
and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the
_Bride of Abydos_. One example is, if we except Dante's _Ugolino_, the
most remarkable instance in literature of the expansion, without the
weakening, of the horrible. Take first Mr. Hobhouse's plain prose: "The
sensations produced by the state of the weather"--it was wretched and
stormy when they left the "Salsette" for the city--"and leaving a
comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which we felt when,
passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypress
which rises above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body." After
this we may measure the almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination
brooding over the incident,--

And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival:
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd on the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grow dull.

No one ever more persistently converted the incidents of travel into
poetic material; but sometimes in doing so he borrowed more largely from
his imagination than his memory, as in the description of the seraglio, of
which there is reason to doubt his having seen more than the entrance.

Byron and Hobhouse set sail from Constantinople on the 14th July,
1810--the latter to return direct to England, a determination which, from
no apparent fault on either side, the former did not regret. One incident
of the passage derives interest from its possible consequence. Taking up,
and unsheathing, a yataghan which he found on the quarter deck, ho
remarked, "I should like to know how a person feels after committing a
murder." This harmless piece of melodrama--the idea of which is expanded
in Mr. Dobell's _Balder_, and parodied in _Firmilian_--may have been the
basis of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by
Goethe, that his lordship had committed a murder; hence, obviously, the
character of _Lara_, and the mystery of _Manfre