It would be easy to depict him, whether from his letters or from contemporary memoirs, as the dissipated darling of society. The year 1813 was the year in which he and Madame de Staël were the rival lions of the season, roaring against each other, not entirely without jealousy. The list of his social engagements, if one troubled to draw it out, would have a very formidable appearance. It would show him going everywhere, meeting everybody, doing everything. We should see him at the great houses, such as Lady Melbourne's, Lady Holland's, Lady Jersey's. We should discover him at the opera and the theatre, now in their boxes, now in his own, and at men's dinners, with Sheridan, and Rogers, "Conversation Sharp," and other brilliant talkers. We should also find him patronising "the fancy," and losing his money at hazard, and drinking several bottles of claret at a sitting--retiring to bed in a sublime state of exaltation, and rising from it with a shocking headache. That, however, would only be one half the picture. Many contemporary observers remarked that Byron passed through the haunts of pleasure with a scowl, and that his face wore a frown whenever his features were in repose. One would infer from that, not that Byron, while really enjoying himself, posed, for the sake of effect, as a man who was secretly eating his heart out, but rather that some secret trouble was actually gnawing at his heart while he made the gestures of a man of pleasure; and the Letters and the Journal--more particularly the Journal--give us many glimpses at this darker side of his life. If he often accepted the invitations which continued to be showered on him, he also frequently declined them, locking himself up alone in his chambers to read, and write, and think things out--persuading himself, after some months had lapsed, that he had really been very little into society, and that it was a matter of indifference to him whether he went into it again or not. And this, it will be observed, is a new note which only begins to be sounded in his intimate writings towards the end of the summer of 1813, after he has allowed Lady Oxford to go abroad alone. There is nothing like it in the days of his dalliance with her. Still less is there anything like it in the writings of the days of his dalliance with Lady Caroline Lamb. Those episodes and adventures, it is quite clear, only touched the surface of his nature. He first pursued them, and then ceased to pursue them, with laughter on his lips, and self-satisfaction--one might even say jollity--in his heart. There was not even anything in them to cradle him into song. The interval between the "Thyrza" poems and the passionate allegorical tales of which "The Giaour" was the first--an interval of some eighteen months--was poetically uneventful. A period of feverish activity succeeded; and it coincided with a renewal of relations with Mary Chaworth.