He spoke often of his mother to Lord Sligo, and with a feeling that
seemed little short of aversion. "Some time or other," he said, "I
will tell you _why_ I feel thus towards her."--A few days after, when
they were bathing together in the Gulf of Lepanto, he referred to this
promise, and, pointing to his naked leg and foot, exclaimed--"Look
there!--it is to her false delicacy at my birth I owe that deformity;
and yet, as long as I can remember, she has never ceased to taunt and
reproach me with it. Even a few days before we parted, for the last
time, on my leaving England, she, in one of her fits of passion,
uttered an imprecation upon me, praying that I might prove as ill
formed in mind as I am in body!" His look and manner, in relating this
frightful circumstance, can be conceived only by those who have ever
seen him in a similar state of excitement.
The little value he had for those relics of ancient art, in pursuit of
which he saw all his classic fellow-travellers so ardent, was, like
every thing he ever thought or felt, unreservedly avowed by him. Lord
Sligo having it in contemplation to expend some money in digging for
antiquities, Lord Byron, in offering to act as his agent, and to see
the money, at least, honestly applied, said--"You may safely trust
_me_--I am no dilettante. Your connoisseurs are all thieves; but I
care too little for these things ever to steal them."
The system of thinning himself, which he had begun before he left
England, was continued still more rigidly abroad.
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