1830.] Moore's Notices of Lord Byron: 191 



Now at length we're off for Turkey 



Lord knows when we may come back; 

 Breezes foul, and tempests murky, 



May unship us in a crack : 

 But, since life at most a jest is, 

 1 As philosophers allow, 

 Still to laugh by far the best is ; 

 Then laugh on, as I do now. 

 Laugh at all things, 

 Great and small things, 

 Sick or well, at sea or shore ; 

 While we're quaffing, 

 Let's have laughing ; 

 Who the devil cares for more ? 

 Some good wine ! and who would lack it, 

 E'en on board The Lisbon Packet ? 



He landed at Lisbon, and rode through Spain to Cadiz. With Cadiz 

 he was delighted, for many reasons : the first of which he gives in the 

 words, " Cadiz is a complete Cythcra. Many of the grandees who have 

 left Madrid during the troubles, reside here ; and it is the prettiest and 

 cleanest town in Europe. The Spanish women are all alike, their 

 education the same. The wife of a duke is in information as the wife of 

 a peasant ; the wife of a peasant is in manner equal to a duchess. Cer- 

 tainly they are fascinating ; but their minds have only one idea, and the 

 business of their lives is intrigue" This character of the Spanish ladies 

 was dashed off after a week's acquaintance with a single town, on the 

 principle of Matthews's story of the French officer in prison at Ports- 

 mouth ; who wrote down in his journal, that all the English ladies 

 boxed, gave each other black eyes, and drank gin. It must be allowed, 

 however, that a larger knowledge of the Peninsula might not have 

 much altered his opinion. Absolution is cheap, and frailty, of course, 

 fashionable. 



At Malta he met with Mrs. Spencer Smith, the wife of Sir Sydney 

 Smith's brother. He describes her as very pretty, very accomplished, ex- 

 tremely eccentric, and twenty-five. She was quite a cosmopolite, was 

 born in Constantinople, the daughter of the Austrian ambassador, married 

 Smith, then, we believe, Envoy, or Secretary of Legation, quarrelled with 

 him, as all women of genius and romance do with their husbands, 

 rambled over the continent, apparently for no other reason, than that 

 she had no business there, ran after the the French, ran from the 

 French, fled with an adventurer, the Marquis De Salvo, from some 

 prison or other, though, as the lady declared, with an unimpeachable 

 character, believed herself a public victim to the security of the conti- 

 nent and took to herself the flattering belief that she was the object of 

 peculiar horror to Napoleon. This was just the woman to captivate the 

 quick fancy of a man like Byron ; and he embalmed her in his first 

 foreign verses. 



In his letters he keeps up a regular detail of his movements, with 

 now and then an anecdote. The following is well told. 



" You don't know D s, do you ? He had a farce ready for the stage 

 before I left England. When Drury-lane was burned to the ground, 

 by which accident Sheridan and his son lost the few remaining shillings 

 they were worth ; what doth my friend D do ? Why, before the fire 



