Deduct the expense
of his education from your rent.
"BYRON."
It was the fate of Lord Byron, throughout life, to meet, wherever he
went, with persons who, by some tinge of the extraordinary in their
own fates or characters, were prepared to enter, at once, into full
sympathy with his; and to this attraction, by which he drew towards
him all strange and eccentric spirits, he owed some of the most
agreeable connections of his life, as well as some of the most
troublesome. Of the former description was an intimacy which he now
cultivated during his short sojourn at Malta. The lady with whom he
formed this acquaintance was the same addressed by him under the name
of "Florence" in Childe Harold; and in a letter to his mother from
Malta, he thus describes her in prose:--"This letter is committed to
the charge of a very extraordinary woman, whom you have doubtless
heard of, Mrs. S---- S----, of whose escape the Marquis de Salvo
published a narrative a few years ago. She has since been shipwrecked,
and her life has been from its commencement so fertile in remarkable
incidents that in a romance they would appear improbable. She was born
at Constantinople, where her father, Baron H----, was Austrian
ambassador; married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point
of character; excited the vengeance of Buonaparte by a part in some
conspiracy; several times risked her life; and is not yet twenty-five.
She is here on her way to England, to join her husband, being obliged
to leave Trieste, where she was paying a visit to her mother, by the
approach of the French, and embarks soon in a ship of war.
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