400 John Gait and Lord Byron. [Oc p r, 



Byron had to struggle with poverty embittered by pride, pride em- 

 bittered by scorn on his descent, scorn pointed by personal deformity, and 

 personal deformity embittered by an almost female vanity of being distin- 

 guished as a beauty ; for his ringlets cost him as much trouble as his poetry, 

 and the smallness and whiteness of his hands were his favourite patent 

 of nobility. His entree into the House of Lords was greeted by the 

 rough ceremony of compelling him to prove that his father was born in 

 wedlock, and his first attempt at literature was plunged in the ice-bath 

 of the Edinburgh Review. 



So much for the education of this child of spleen. His first lessons 

 were to shun mankind, his second to hate them, and his third to insult, 

 scorn, and satirize them, and it must be owned that misanthropy never 

 had a more devoted pupil. 



Mr. Gait's first meeting with the noble poet was accidental. " It 

 was at Gibraltar that I first fell in with Lord Byron. I had arrived 

 there in the packet from England in indifferent health, on my way to 

 Sicily. I only went a trip, intending to return home after spending a 

 few weeks in Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia ; having, before my departure, 

 entered into the Society of Lincoln's-inn, with the design of studying 

 the law. 



ff At this time, my friend, the late Colonel Wright, was Secretary to 

 the Governor, and during the short stay of the packet at the Rock, he 

 invited me to the hospitalities of his house, and among other civilities, 

 gave me admission to the garrison library. 



" The day, I well remember, was exceedingly sultry. The air was 

 sickly, and if it was not a sirocco, it was a withering Levanter, oppressive 

 to the functions of life, and to an invalid, denying all exercise ; instead 

 of rambling over the fortifications, I was, in consequence, constrained to 

 spend the hottest part of the day in the library, and, while sitting there, 

 a young man came in, and seated himself opposite to me at the table 

 where I was reading. Something in his appearance attracted my atten- 

 tion. His dress indicated a Londoner of some fashion, partly by its 

 neatness and simplicity, with just so much of a peculiarity of style as 

 served to shew, that though he belonged to the order of metropolitan 

 beaux, he was not altogether a common one. 



" I thought his face not unknown to me. I began to conjecture 

 where I could have seen him, and after an unobserved scrutiny, to 

 speculate as to both his character and his vacation. His physiognomy 

 was prepossessing and intelligent, but ever and anon his brows lowered 

 and gathered, a habit, as I then thought, with a degree of affectation in 

 improbably first assumed for picturesque effect and energetic expression ; 

 but which I afterwards discovered, was undoubtedly the occasional 

 scowl of some unpleasant reminiscences : it was certainly disagreeable, 

 forbidding ; but still the general cast of his features was impressed with 

 elegance and character." 



At dinner, Mr. Gait partially made, by the help of " Tom Sheridan," 

 the discovery of the " mysterious man with the knitted brows/ 7 Lord 

 Byron and Mr. Hobhouse were mentioned as having arrived in the 

 packet. Still, however, the problem was incomplete. He had not seen 

 either before, and the grand difficulty was to know which was the true 

 Simon Pure. Nay, he would not be certain but that Mr. Cam Hobhouse, 

 on whose poems he pronounces the fatal verdict of being " rather re- 

 spectable in their way," one of the most long-drawn tortures that we can 

 conceive to be inflicted in the cruelty of criticism that the irritable 



