his horses, the curious amongst our country-people, who were anxious to
obtain a glimpse of him, used to resort; and it was amusing in the
extreme to witness the excessive coolness with which ladies, as well as
gentlemen, would advance within a very few paces of him, eyeing him,
some with their glasses, as they would have done a statue in a museum,
or the wild beasts at Exeter 'Change. However flattering this might be
to a man's vanity, Lord Byron, though he bore it very patiently,
expressed himself, as I believe he really was, excessively annoyed at
it.

"The curiosity that was expressed by all classes of travellers to see
him, and the eagerness with which they endeavoured to pick up any
anecdotes of his mode of life, were carried to a length which will
hardly be credited. It formed the chief subject of their inquiries of
the gondoliers who conveyed them from _terra firma_ to the floating
city; and these people who are generally loquacious, were not at all
backward in administering to the taste and humours of their passengers,
relating to them the most extravagant and often unfounded stories. They
took care to point out the house where he lived, and to give such hints
of his movements as might afford them an opportunity of seeing him.

"Many of the English visitors, under pretext of seeing his house, in
which there were no paintings of any consequence, nor, besides himself,
anything worthy of notice, contrived to obtain admittance through the
cupidity of his servants, and with the most barefaced impudence forced
their way even into his bedroom, in the hopes of seeing him. Hence
arose, in a great measure, his bitterness towards them, which he has
expressed in a note to one of his poems, on the occasion of some
unfounded remark made upon him by an anonymous traveller in Italy; and
it certainly appears well calculated to foster that cynicism which
prevails in his latter works more particularly, and which, as well as
the misanthropical expressions that occur in those which first raised
his reputation, I do not believe to have been his natural feeling. Of
this I am certain, that I never witnessed greater kindness than in Lord
Byron."

Byron's note to which Hoppner alludes is in _Marino Faliero_. The
conclusion of it is as follows: "The fact is, I hold in utter abhorrence
any contact with the travelling English, as my friend the Consul General
Hoppner and the Countess Benzoni (in whose house the Converzasione
mostly fre