But even here, his sensibility had to
encounter one of those freezing checks, to which feelings, so much
above the ordinary temperature of the world, are but too constantly
exposed;--it being from one of the very friends thus fondly valued by
him, that he experienced, on leaving England, that mark of neglect of
which he so indignantly complains in a note on the second Canto of
Childe Harold,--contrasting with this conduct the fidelity and
devotedness he had just found in his Turkish servant, Dervish. Mr.
Dallas, who witnessed the immediate effect of this slight upon him,
thus describes his emotion:--
"I found him bursting with indignation. 'Will you believe it?' said
he, 'I have just met ----, and asked him to come and sit an hour with
me: he excused himself; and what do you think was his excuse? He was
engaged with his mother and some ladies to go shopping! And he knows I
set out to-morrow, to be absent for years, perhaps never to
return!--Friendship! I do not believe I shall leave behind me,
yourself and family excepted, and perhaps my mother, a single being
who will care what becomes of me.'"
From his expressions in a letter to Mrs. Byron, already cited, that he
must "do something in the House soon," as well as from a more definite
intimation of the same intention to Mr. Harness, it would appear that
he had, at this time, serious thoughts of at once entering on the high
political path which his station as an hereditary legislator opened to
him.
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