I go back for a moment to that Blessington Salon--in order to close her story. There was a narrowed income--a failure of her jointure--a shortening of her book sales; but, notwithstanding, there was a long struggle to keep that brilliant little court alive. One grows to like so much the music and the fêtes and the glitter of the chandeliers, and the unction of flattering voices! But at last the ruin came; on a sudden the sheriffs were there; and clerks with their inventories in place of the “Tokens” and “annuals”--with their gorgeous engravings by Finden & Heath--which the Mistress had exploited; and she hurried off--after the elegant D’Orsay--to Paris, hoping to rehabilitate herself, on the Champs Elysées, under the wing of Louis Napoleon, just elected President. I chanced to see her in her coupé there, on a bright afternoon early in 1849--with elegant silken wraps about her and a shimmer of the old kindly smile upon her shrunken face--dashing out to the Bois; but within three months there was another sharp change; she--dead, and her pretty _decolleté_ court at an end forever. _The Poet of Newstead._ The reminiscences and conversations of Lord Byron, which we have at the hands of Lady Blessington, belong to a time, of course, much earlier than her series of London triumphs, and date with her journeys in Italy. A score of years at least before ever the chandeliers of her Irish ladyship were lighted in Gore House, Byron[62] had gone sailing away from England under a storm of wrath; and he never came back again. Indeed it is not a little extraordinary that one of the most typical of English poets, should--like Landor, with whom he had many traits in common--have passed so little of his active life on English ground. Like Landor, he loved England most when England was most behind him. Like Landor, he was gifted with such rare powers as belonged to few Englishmen of that generation. In Landor these powers, so far as they expressed themselves in literary form, were kept in check by the iron rulings of a scrupulous and exacting craftsmanship; while in Byron they broke all trammels, whether of craftsmanship or reason, and glowed and blazed the more by reason of their audacities. Both were prone to great tempests of wrath which gave to both furious joys, and, I think, as furious regrets.