Note 114 — THE GIAOUR.
Reading edition
[Byron was wont to let his imagination dwell on these details of the charnel-house. In a letter to Dallas, August 12, 1811, he writes, "I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation; but the worms are less ceremonious." See, too, his "Lines inscribed upon a Cup formed from a Skull," Poetical Works, 1898, i. 276.]