more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me hop about a
little with her chain around my leg.

My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling
me to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who,
until now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal
intercourse as the wits of Queen Anne's time or Ben Jenson's
compotators at the Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed
myself was the letter to Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking
much older than I had anticipated, although, considering his former
irregularities of life and the various wear and tear of his
constitution, not older than a man on the verge of sixty reasonably
may look. But I had invested his earthly frame, in my imagination,
with the poet's spiritual immortality. He wears a brown wig, very
luxuriantly curled, and extending down over his forehead. The
expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles. His early
tendency to obesity having increased, Lord Byron is now enormously
fat,--so fat as to give the impression of a person quite overladen
with his own flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his
personal life through the great mass of corporeal substance which
weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while
it fills your eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within
yourself, "For Heaven's sake, where is he?" Were I disposed to be
caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol,
in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which
unspiritualize man's nature and clog up his avenues of communication
with the better life. But this would be too harsh; and, besides,
Lord Byron's morals have been improving while his outward man has
swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he were
leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet it