As from the stroke of the enchanters wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles."

But whatever emotions the first sight of such a scene might, under other
circumstances, have inspired me with, the mood of mind in which I now
viewed it was altogether the very reverse of what might have been expected.
The exuberant gaiety of my companion, and the recollections,--any thing
but romantic,--into which our conversation wandered, put at once
completely to flight all poetical and historical associations; and our
course was, I am almost ashamed to say, one of uninterrupted merriment and
laughter till we found ourselves at the steps of my friend's palazzo on
the Grand Canal. All that had ever happened, of gay or ridiculous, during
our London life together,--his scrapes and my lecturings,--our joint
adventures with the Bores and Blues, the two great enemies, as he always
called them, of London happiness,--our joyous nights together at Watier's,
Kinnaird's, &c. and "that d--d supper of Rancliffe's which _ought_ to have
been a dinner,"--all was passed rapidly in review between us, and with a
flow of humour and hilarity, on his side, of which it would have been
difficult, even for persons far graver than I can pretend to be, not to
have caught the contagion.


LORD BYRON'S PARSIMONY.

It is, indeed, certain, that he had at this time (1819) taken up the whim
(for it hardly deserves a more serious name) of minute and constant