flippant, trenchant, or
sparkling--few portions are more calculated to excite a smile than the
record of his frequent resolutions made, reasseverated, and broken, to
have done with literature; even going the length on some occasions of
threatening to suppress his works, and, if possible, recall the existing
copies. He affected being a man of the world unmercifully, and had a real
delight in clever companions who assumed the same role. Frequent allusion
is made to his intercourse with Erskine and Sheridan: the latter he is
never tired of praising, as "the author of the best modern comedy (_School
for Scandal_), the best farce (_The Critic_), and the best oration (the
famous Begum speech) ever heard in this country." They spent many an
evening together, and probably cracked many a bottle. It is Byron who
tells the story of Sheridan being found in a gutter in a sadly incapable
state; and, on some one asking "Who is this?" stammering out
"Wilberforce." On one occasion he speaks of coming out of a tavern with
the dramatist, when they both found the staircase in a very cork-screw
condition: and elsewhere, of encountering a Mr. C----, who "had no notion
of meeting with a bon-vivant in a scribbler," and summed the poet's eulogy
with the phrase, "he drinks like a man." Hunt, the tattler, who observed
his lordship's habits in Italy, with the microscope of malice ensconced
within the same walls, makes it a charge against his host that he would
not drink like a man. Once for all it may be noted, that although there
was no kind of excess in which Byron, whether from bravado or inclination,
failed occasionally to indulge, he was never for any stretch of time given
over, like Burns, to what is technically termed intemperance. His head
does not seem to have been strong, and under the influence of stimulants
he may have been led to talk a great deal of his dangerous nonsense. But
though he could not say, with Wordsworth, that only once, at Cambridge,
had his brain been "excited by the fumes of wine," his prevailing sins
were in other directions.

CHAPTER VI.

MARRIAGE, AND FAREWELL TO ENGLAND.

"As for poets," says Scott, "I have seen all the best of my time and
country, and, though Burns had the most glorious eye imaginable, I never
thought any of them would come up to an artist's notion of the character,
except Byron. His countenance is a thing to dream of." Coleridge writes to
the same effect, in language even stronger. We