A Day with Lord Byron

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Byron May Clarissa Gillington. A Day with Lord Byron

A DAY WITH BYRON

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One February afternoon in the year 1822, about two o'clock, – for this is the hour at which his day begins, – "the most notorious personality of his century" arouses himself, in the Palazzo Lanfranchi at Pisa. George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron, languidly arises and dresses, with the assistance of his devoted valet Fletcher. Invariably he awakes in very low spirits, "in actual despair and despondency," he has termed it: this is in part constitutional, and partly, no doubt, a reaction after the feverish brain-work of the previous night. It is, at any rate, in unutterable melancholy and ennui that he surveys in the mirror that slight and graceful form, which had been idolised by London drawing-rooms, and that pale, scornful, beautiful face, "like a spirit, good or evil," which the enthusiastic Walter Scott has termed a thing to dream of. He notes the grey streaks already visible among his dark brown locks, and mutters his own lines miserably to himself, —

An innumerable motley crowd of reminiscences – most of them bitter, sorrowful, or contemptuous, throng across his mind, shaping themselves into poignant verse:

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His men, in short, as has been observed, are "made after his own image, and his women after his own heart." Yet the inveterate family likeness of these heroes is not shared by the heroines of his romantic stanzas: for Byron has an eclectic taste in beauty. One can hardly imagine a wider dissimilarity than between the Bride of Abydos, the gentle Zuleika, with her

and "Circassia's daughter," the stately Leila of The Giaour, whose black and flowing hair "swept the marble where her feet gleamed whiter than the mountain sleet." Or, if the reader seek a further choice, there is Medora, beloved of the Corsair, – Medora of the deep blue eye and long fair hair; or the nameless Eastern maiden of the Hebrew Melodies:

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