neral a very attentive, listener. When, however, he did engage with
earnestness in conversation, his ideas succeeded each other with such
uncommon rapidity that he could not control them. They burst from him
impetuously; and although he both attended to and noticed the remarks of
others, yet he did not allow these to check his discourse for an
instant."

"There was usually," writes Count Gamba, his friend and companion in
Greece, in his interesting work, entitled "Last Travels of Lord Byron in
Greece," "a liveliness of spirit and a tendency to joke, even at times
of great danger, when other men would have become serious and
pre-occupied. This disposition of mind gave him a kind of air of
frankness and sincerity which was quite irresistible with those persons
even who were most prejudiced against him."

This allusion of Count Gamba refers to the letter which Byron wrote in
the midst of the Suliotes, among whom he had taken refuge during the
storm and to escape the Turks.

"If any thing," writes Lord Byron, on the point of embarking for
Missolonghi, and in his last letter to Moore, "if any thing in the way
of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age
of a brother warbler, like Garcilasso de la Vega, I pray you remember me
in 'your smiles and wine.'

"I have hopes that the cause will triumph; but, whether it does or no,
still 'honor must be minded as strictly as a milk diet.' I trust to
observe both.

BYRON."

"It is matter of history," continues Count Gamba, "that Lord Byron, in
consequence of vexations to which he was ever a victim, added to the
rigorous diet which he followed (he only fed upon vegetables and green
tea, to show that he could live as frugally as a Greek soldier), and
from the impossibility which he found to take any exercise at
Missolonghi, had a nervous fit, which deprived him of the power of
speech and alarmed all his friends and acquaintances. When the crisis
had worn off, he merely laughed over it."

"Even at Missolonghi," says Parry, who knew him there only in the midst
of troubles and vexations of every description and quite at the close of
his life, "he loved to jest in words and actions. These pleasantries
lightened his spirits, and prevented him from dwelling on disagreeable
thoughts."

Perhaps this disposition of character was the result of his French
origin, for it is scarcely known or even appreciated in England.

"Yet," exclaims the greatest-minded woma