They did take that view, however, and devoted themselves, in the modern phraseology, to "interviewing" Byron. He was so different from them--so much greater--and so much more interesting--that they could no more converse with him lightly, on common topics and on equal terms, than they could so converse with a monster advertised as the leading attraction of a freak museum. Shelley, indeed, might do so, being his friend as well as his admirer, and one who moved naturally on the same plane of thought; but the others could only approach him humbly from below, sit at his feet, and talk to him about himself. After his back was turned, they might presume to quiz and satirise--Leigh Hunt did so, and so, too, to a less extent, did both Trelawny and Lady Blessington; but, at the time, they could get no further than begging permission to ask questions. The permission was always accorded. Byron had never seriously resisted the doctrine that his private affairs were of public interest; and he had, at this period of his life, completely succumbed to it. No topic was so delicate that his interlocutors felt any obligation to avoid it. His quarrel with Lady Byron; his adventures with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, his excursions into inebriety with Sheridan and Scrope Davies; his losses at hazard with the dandies; the moral laxity of the Venetian interlude; the placid pleasure which he found in his relations with Madame Guiccioli: on all these topics he talked at large and at length whenever any stray companion started them. His readiness thus to gossip with all comers on his most intimate affairs is noticed somewhere by Hobhouse as one of the gravest defects of his character; but very likely there was not much else to talk about in that dull provincial town; and in any case Byron did not invariably tell the truth. Trelawny says that he delighted to "bam" those who conversed with him; but that queer slang word has long since gone out of date. A more modern way of putting it would be to say that he liked to "gas," having no inconsiderable contempt for those who tried to pump him, and being more anxious to tell them things that would astonish them than to supply them with accurate information. Having left London in the days of the dandies, he had taken some of the ideals of the dandies to Italy with him, though he had coated them with a cosmopolitan veneer. He still liked to swagger in the style of a buck of the Regency who spared neither man in his anger nor woman in his lust and could carry any quantity of claret with heroic lightness of heart. Or, at all events, he liked to swagger in that way from time to time; though one can see, collating the confidences with the letters, that there were also moments at which the mask was lifted and the real man appeared.