1831.] Byron's Memoirs. 157 



knowledge. Yet it was rather an awkward circumstance that this man- 

 slaying determination should have been thus blazoned to Murray, whose 

 intercourse with the doctor was notoriously so constant, and who would, 

 we must suppose, be not disinclined to prevent the collision of his prin- 

 cipal poet and his principal reviewer. However, the menace came to 

 nothing ; and Missolonghi, not Hyde Park, was to be the scene of his 

 lordship's castrametation. We here mean no impeachment of his cou- 

 rage ; for, so far as pistoling goes, he would have probably stoDd to be 

 shot at, with as much sang froid as the multitude of militia ensigns, St. 

 James's blacklegs, and Cheapside heroes, who love to flourish in the 

 " tented field" of Chalk-farm. His lordship's brains were of another 

 calibre; but he was, as his biographer observed, strangely fond of 

 talking and threatening in those matters ; and even his eternal pistol- 

 practice had something in it which a man of nice honour could not have 

 easily reconciled to his feelings. The regular pistol-practiser the 

 " can die- snuffer at a dozen paces/' &c. &c. is merely a gentleman who 

 does his best to make that shot sure, which, by the laws of honour, 

 should be uncertain ; and to take advantage of the unskilfulness of 

 others, in a contest where the laws of honour require the most perfect 

 equality. The man who has practised till he can hit the ace of spades, 

 and who yet calls out, to stand his shot, an antagonist who may never 

 have fired a pistol in his life, is not a duellist, but an assassin. 

 His lordship had another trouble, too: 



" I have here my natural daughter, by name Allegra a pretty little girl 

 enough, and reckoned like papa. Her mamma is English ; but it is a long 

 story and there's an end." 



This unfortunate infant had been sent to him by the mamma a 

 female philosopher of the " community-of-property" school who had 

 too much superiority to the age to restrain herself from being his lord- 

 ship's mistress for the time, or to keep the miserable infant which was 

 the fruit of their vices. This child died when about five years old. 



From time to time, his letters give us sketches of the figures w r hich 

 he subsequently embodied into his poems : 



" I wish you good night, with a Venetian benediction. Benedetto te, e la 

 tierra che tifara. (May you be blessed, and the earth which you will make !) 

 Is it not pretty ? You would think it still prettier, if you had heard it, as I 

 did two hours ago, from the lips of a Venetian girl, with large, black eyes, a 

 face like Faustina's, and the figure of a Juno tall and energetic as a Pytho- 

 ness, with eyes flashing, and her dark hair streaming in the moonlight, one 

 of those women who may be made any thing. I am sure, if I put a poignard 

 into the hand of this one, she would plunge it where I told her ; and into 

 me, if I offended her. I like this kind of animal, and am sure that I should 

 have preferred Medea to any woman that ever breathed. * * * * I could 

 have forgiven the dagger, the bowl, any thing; but the deliberate desolation 

 piled upon me, when I stood alone upon my hearth, with my household gods 

 shivered around me." 



This image he afterwards transferred to one of his tragedies : 



" I had one only fount of quiet left, 



And that they poisoned. My pure household gods 



Were shivered on my hearth." Marino Faliero. 



It is not very easy to comprehend the sort of admiration that can be 

 felt for a woman ready to dip her hands in blood a quality which we 



