"Nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt and desperation. The fact is that, first, the Italian women with whom he associates are, perhaps, the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon--the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; Countesses smell so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L. B. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but I believe, seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature and habits of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and despair?... And he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to him, but, unfortunately, it does not outlast your departure. No, I do not doubt, and for his sake I ought to hope, that his present career must end soon in some violent circumstance." This, it is to be remarked, is the picture, not of an enemy, but of a friend--one who already admired Byron as the greatest poet of his generation, and was to learn to admire him as one of its greatest men: a man capable of doing great things as well as dreaming them. Evidently, therefore, it is, as far as it goes, a true picture, though there is something to be added to it--something which blackens, and also something which brightens it. Byron, to begin with, was, during this dark period, as careless of his appearance as of his morals. It was not necessary to his facile conquests among the Venetian courtesans that he should be either sober or well-groomed. It may even, on the contrary, have been necessary that he should drink too much and go unkempt in order to live comfortably on their level. At all events he did drink too much--preferring fiery spirits to the harmless Italian wines--and indulged a large appetite for miscellaneous foods, and ceased his frequentation of the barber's shop; with the result that the flesh, set free from its customary discipline, revolted and spread abroad, and Hanson, who came to Byron at Venice to settle about the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, reported to Augusta that he had found him "_fat_, immensely large, and his hair long." James Wedderburn Webster, a few months later, heard of his "corpulence" as "stupendous;" and Byron, while objecting to that epithet, was constrained to admit that it was considerable.