previous next

[63] Campbell, whose spirits have lately been much improved by a legacy of £ 5,000, was the life and wit of the party. He is a short, small man, and has one of the roundest and most lively faces I have seen amongst this grave people. His manners seemed as open as his countenance, and his conversation as spirited as his poetry. He could have kept me amused till morning; but midnight is the hour for separating, and the party broke up at once.

June 23.—We spent half the forenoon in Mr. West's gallery, where he has arranged all the pictures that he still owns. . . . He told us a singular anecdote of Nelson, while we were looking at the picture of his death. Just before he went to sea for the last time, West sat next to him at a large entertainment given to him here, and in the course of the dinner Nelson expressed to Sir William Hamilton his regret, that in his youth he had not acquired some taste for art and some power of discrimination. ‘But,’ said he, turning to West, ‘there is one picture whose power I do feel. I never pass a paint-shop where your “Death of Wolfe” is in the window, without being stopped by it.’ West, of course, made his acknowledgments, and Nelson went on to ask why he had painted no more like it. ‘Because, my lord, there are no more subjects.’ ‘D—n it,’ said the sailor, ‘I did n't think of that,’ and asked him to take a glass of champagne. ‘But, my lord, I fear your intrepidity will yet furnish me such another scene; and, if it should, I shall certainly avail myself of it.’ ‘Will you?’ said Nelson, pouring out bumpers, and touching his glass violently against West's,—‘will you, Mr. West? then I hope that I shall die in the next battle.’ He sailed a few days after, and the result was on the canvas before us.

After leaving Mr. West, I went by appointment to see Lord Byron. He was busy when I first went in, and I found Lady Byron alone. She did not seem so pretty to me as she did the other day; but what she may have lost in regular beauty she made up in variety and expression of countenance during the conversation. She is diffident,— she is very young, not more, I think, than nineteen,—but is obviously possessed of talent, and did not talk at all for display. For the quarter of an hour during which I was with her, she talked upon a considerable variety of subjects,—America, of which she seemed to know considerable; of France, and Greece, with something of her husband's visit there,—and spoke of all with a justness and a light good-humor that would have struck me even in one of whom I had heard nothing.

With Lord Byron I had an extremely pleasant and instructive


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
France (France) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Benjamin West (4)
Nelson (3)
Wolfe (1)
William Hamilton (1)
John Campbell (1)
Byron (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
June 23rd (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: