the same apartment asked me what I could possibly have been telling
Byron by which he was so much agitated.

I saw Byron, for the last time, in 1815, after I returned from France.
He dined, or lunched, with me at Long's in Bond Street. I never saw him
so full of gaiety and good-humour, to which the presence of Mr. Mathews,
the comedian, added not a little. Poor Terry was also present. After one
of the gayest parties I ever was present at, my fellow-traveller, Mr.
Scott, of Gala, and I set off for Scotland, and I never saw Lord Byron
again. Several letters passed between us--one perhaps every half year.
Like the old heroes in Homer, we exchanged gifts:--I gave Byron a
beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the
redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed, in the Iliad,
for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver.
It was full of dead men's bones, and had inscriptions on two sides of
the base. One ran thus:--'The bones contained in this urn were found in
certain ancient sepulchres within the land walls of Athens, in the month
of February, 1811.' The other face bears the lines of Juvenal:

"Expende--quot libras in duce summo invenies.
--Mors sola fatetur quantula hominum corpuscula."
Juv. x.

To these I have added a third inscription, in these words--'The gift of
Lord Byron to Walter Scott.'[79] There was a letter with this vase more
valuable to me than the gift itself, from the kindness with which the
donor expressed himself towards me. I left it naturally in the urn with
the bones,--but it is now missing. As the theft was not of a nature to
be practised by a mere domestic, I am compelled to suspect the
inhospitality of some individual of higher station,--most gratuitously
exercised certainly, since, after what I have here said, no one will
probably choose to boast of possessing this literary curiosity.

"We had a good deal of laughing, I remember, on what the public might be
supposed to think, or say, concerning the gloomy and ominous nature of
our mutual gifts.

"I think I can add little more to my recollections of Byron. He was
often melancholy,--almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humour, I
used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some
natural and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when
the shadows almost always left his countenance, like the mist r