Note 12b — II. THE BABY’S DEBUT. [5a]

This would seem to show that poet and prophet are synonymous, the noble bard having afterwards returned to England, and again quitted it, under domestic circumstances painfully notorious. His good-humoured forgiveness of the Authors has already been alluded to in the Preface. Nothing of this illustrious poet, however trivial, can be otherwise than interesting. “We know him well.” At Mr. Murray’s dinner-table the annotator met him and Sir John Malcolm. Lord Byron talked of intending to travel in Persia. “What must I do when I set off?” said he to Sir John. “Cut off your buttons!” “My buttons! what, these metal ones!” “Yes; the Persians are in the main very honest fellows; but if you go thus bedizened, you will infallibly be murdered for your buttons!” At a dinner at Monk Lewis’s chambers in the Albany, Lord Byron expressed to the writer his determination not to go there again, adding, “I never will dine with a middle-aged man who fills up his table with young ensigns, and has looking-glass panels to his book-cases.” Lord Byron, when one of the Drury-lane Committee of Management, challenged the writer to sing alternately (like the swains in Virgil) the praises of Mrs. Mardyn, the actress, who, by-the-bye, was hissed off the stage for an imputed intimacy of which she was quite innocent.