Moore often recurs to Byron's liveliness. "Nothing, indeed, could be
more amusing and delightful.... It was like the bursting gayety of a boy
let loose from school, and seemed as if there was no extent of fun or
tricks of which he was not capable." When Moore visited him at Mira, in
the autumn of 1812, and accompanied him to Venice, the former expressed
himself as follows in his memorandum of that occasion:--

"As we proceeded across the lagoon in his gondola the sun was just
setting, and it was an evening such as Romance would have chosen for a
first sight of Venice, rising 'with her tiara of bright towers' above
the wave; while to complete, as might be imagined, the solemn interest
of the scene, I behold it in company with him who had lately given a new
life to its glories, and sung of that fair City of the Sea thus
grandly:--

'I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sat in state, throned on her hundred isles!'

"But whatever emotions the first sight of such a scene might, under
other circumstances, have inspired me with, the mood of mind in which I
now viewed it was altogether the reverse of what might have been
expected. The exuberant gayety of my companion, and the
recollections--any thing but romantic--into which our conversation
wandered, put at once completely to flight all poetical and historical
associations; and our course was, I am almost ashamed to say, one of
uninterrupted merriment and laughter till we found ourselves at the
steps of my friend's palazzo on the Grand Canal. All that ever happened,
of gay or ridiculous, during our London life together; his scrapes and
my lecturings; our joint adventures with the Bores and Blues, the two
great enemies, as he always called them, of London happiness; our joyous
nights together at Walter's, Kinnaird's, etc.; and that 'd--d supper of
Rancliffe's, which ought to have been a dinner;' all was passed rapidly
in review between us, and with a flow of humor and hilarity on his side
of which it would have been difficult for persons even far graver than
even I can pretend to be, not to have caught the contagion."

Lord Byron was