A meagre breakfast,--of claret and soda with a few mouthfuls of some Italian dish,--somewhat restores his natural vivacity: and he listens with cynical amusement to Fletcher's blood-curdling stories of the phantoms who have made night hideous. For the famous old feudal Palazzo, with its dungeons and secret chambers, has been immemorially infested with ghosts, and harassed by inexplicable noises. Fletcher has already begged leave to change his room, and then refused to occupy his new room, because, as his master reports, "there are more ghosts there than in the other!... There is one place where people were evidently walled up ... I am bothered about these spectres, as they say the last occupants were too." However, he is laughing as he descends the magnificent staircase,--the reputed work of Michael Angelo,--laughing until the shrill querulous cries of peevish children make him stop and frown. He has allowed the Leigh Hunts, with their large and fractious family, to occupy for the present the ground-floor of the Palazzo; and children are his pet abhorrence. "I abominate the sight of them so much," he has already told Moore, "that I have always had the greatest respect for the character of Herod!" No child figures in any of his poems: his own paternal feeling towards "Ada, sole daughter of my house and home," is merely a fluctuating sentiment. He shrugs his shoulders and enters his great _salon_, again moody and with a downcast air: and throws himself upon a couch in gloomy reverie. Snatches of poetry wander through his thoughts--poetry intrinsically autobiographical, for "the inequalities of his style are those of his career," and his imaginary heroes are endless reproductions of himself, "the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind." He has drawn his own picture more effectively in _Lara_ than any strange hand could do. In him, inexplicably mix'd, appear'd Much to be loved and hated, sought and fear'd; Opinion, varying o'er his hidden lot, In praise or railing ne'er his name forgot.... There was in him a vital scorn of all: As if the worst had fall'n which could befall; He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurl'd.... His early dreams of good outstripp'd the truth, And troubled manhood follow'd baffled youth. His men, in short, as has been observed, are "made after his own image, and his women after his own heart." Yet the inveterate family likeness of these heroes is not shared by the heroines of his romantic stanzas: for Byron has an eclectic taste in beauty. One can hardly imagine a wider dissimilarity than between the _Bride of Abydos_, the gentle Zuleika, with her "Nameless charms unmark'd by her alone-- The light of love, the purity of grace, The mind, the music breathing from her face, The heart whose softness harmonised the whole, And oh! that eye was in itself a Soul."