"A sort of Don Quixote fighting with the police for a woman of the town," is Lady Hester's verdict, suggested, no doubt, by the adventure on which Byron put such a different colour when he related it to Medwin. "He wanted," she continues, "to make himself something great," but she will not allow that he succeeded. "He had a great deal of vice in his looks," she says, "his eyes set close together and a contracted brow"; and, as for his poetry, Lady Hester shakes her head even over that: "At Athens, I saw nothing in him but a well-bred man, like many others; for, as for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as for the thoughts, who knows where he got them? Many a one picks up some old book that nobody knows anything about, and gets his ideas out of it." That reflection, perhaps, always supposing that Dr. Merryon has reported it correctly, throws a brighter flood of light upon the critic's mind than upon the poet's genius; but the criticism offered by Sir Stratford Canning was a criticism of matters which he understood. He "cannot," he says, "forbear to record" what happened when Byron obtained permission to be present at an audience granted by the Sultan to the _corps diplomatique_. There is a reference to the story in Moore's "Journal"; but the authorised version must be sought in Lord Stratford de Redcliffe's Papers: "We had assembled," he writes, "in the hall of our so-called palace when Lord Byron arrived in scarlet regimentals topped by a profusely feathered cocked hat, and, coming up to me, asked what his place as a peer of the realm was to be in the procession. I referred him to Mr. Adair, who had not yet left his room, and the upshot of their private interview was that, as the Turks ignored all but officials, any amateur, though a peer, must be content to follow in the wake of the Embassy. His lordship thereupon walked away with that look of scornful indignation which so well became his fine, imperious features." "As Canning refused to walk behind him, Byron went home," is Hobhouse's laconic report of the incident; but when a letter from the Ambassador followed him, he apologised. His fancy dress, it had seemed to him, was quite as becoming as other people's uniforms; he had honestly supposed himself to be standing out for the legitimate rights of a peer of the realm. As this was not so--as the Austrian Internuncio had been consulted and had said that it was not so--then he would be glad to join the procession as a simple individual, and humbly to follow his Excellency and "his ox or his ass or anything that was his." Whether that was a subtle way of calling Stratford Canning an ass does not appear; but the transaction was a characteristic exhibition of the neck-or-nothing audacity of Byron's undisciplined youth. He figures, at this date, as a Lord among adventurers and an adventurer among Lords.