for instance, I would receive a note from Lady

requesting the pleasure of my company on a particular evening, with a postscript, "Pray, could you not contrive to bring Lord Byron with you?"-Once, at a great party given by Lady Jersey, Mrs. Sheridan ran up to me and said, "Do, as a favour, try if you can place Lord Byron beside me at supper.”

Byron had prodigious facility of composition. He was fond of suppers; and used often to sup at my house and eat heartily (for he had then given up the hard biscuit and soda-water diet): after going home, he would throw off sixty or eighty verses, which he would send to press next morning.

He one evening took me to the green-room of Drury Lane Theatre, where I was much entertained. When the play began, I went round to the front of the house, and desired the box-keeper to show me into Lord Byron's box. I had been there about minute, thinking myself quite alone, when suddenly Byron and Miss Boyce (the actress) emerged from a dark corner.

In those days at least, Byron had no readiness of reply in conversation. If you happened to let fall any observation which offended him, he would say

1

nothing at the time; but the offence would lie rankling in his mind; and perhaps a fortnight after, he would suddenly come out with some very cutting remarks upon you, giving them as his deliberate opinions, the results of his experience of your cha

racter.

Several women were in love with Byron, but none so violently as Lady Caroline Lamb. She absolutely besieged him. He showed me the first letter he received from her; in which she assured him that, if he was in any want of money, "all her jewels were at his service." They frequently had quarrels; and more than once, on coming home, I have found Lady C. walking in the garden,* and waiting for me, to beg that I would reconcile them.-When she met Byron at a party, she would always, if possible, return home from it in his carriage, and accompanied by him: I recollect particularly their returning to town together from Holland House.-But such was the insanity of her passion for Byron, that, sometimes, when not invited to a party where he was to be, she would wait for him in the street till it was over! One night, after a great party at Devonshire House,

Behind Mr. Rogers's house, in St. James's Place.-ED.

to which Lady Caroline had not been invited, I saw her, yes, saw her,-talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into the carriage which he had just entered. In spite of all this absurdity, my firm belief is that there was nothing criminal between them.

Byron at last was sick of her. When their intimacy was at an end, and while she was living in the country, she burned, very solemnly, on a sort of funeral pile, transcripts of all the letters which she had received from Byron, and a copy of a miniature (his portrait) which he had presented to her; several girls from the neighbourhood, whom she had dressed in white garments, dancing round the pile, and singing a song which she had written for the occasion, "Burn, fire, burn," &c.-She was mad; and her family allowed her to do whatever she chose.

Latterly, I believe, Byron never dined with Lady B.; for it was one of his fancies (or affectations) that "he could not endure to see women eat." I recollect that he once refused to meet Madame de Staël at my house at dinner, but came in the evening; and when I have asked him to dinner without mentioning what company I was to have, he would write me a note to inquire "if I had invited any women."