themselves.  We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, {181} waited to receive him in the hall.

’Both he and Colman were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the wine had previously carried away my memory:  so that all was hiccough and happiness for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the conversation.  Perhaps you heard of a late answer of Sheridan to the watchman who found him bereft of that “divine particle of air” called reason . . .  He (the watchman) found Sherry in the street fuddled and bewildered, and almost insensible.  “Who are you, sir?”—­No answer.  “What’s your name?”—­A hiccough.  “What’s your name?”—­Answer, in a slow, deliberate, and impassive tone, “Wilberforce!” Is not that Sherry all over?—­and, to my mind, excellent.  Poor fellow, his very dregs are better than the “first sprightly runnings” of others.

   ’My paper is full, and I have a grievous headache.

’P.S.—­Lady B. is in full progress.  Next month will bring to light (with the aid of “Juno Lucina, fer opem,” or rather opes, for the last are most wanted) the tenth wonder of the world; Gil Blas being the eighth, and he (my son’s father) the ninth.’

Here we have a picture of the whole story,—­Lady Byron within a month of her confinement; her money being used to settle debts; her husband out at a dinner-party, going through the usual course of such parties, able to keep his legs and help Sheridan downstairs, and going home ’gloomy, and savage to ferocity,’ to his wife.

Four days after this (letter 229), we find that this dinner-party is not an exceptional one, but one of a series:  for he says, ’To-day I dine with Kinnaird,—­we are to have Sheridan and Colman again; and to-morrow, once more, at Sir Gilbert Heathcote’s.’

Afterward, in Venice, he reviews the state of his health, at this period in London; and his account shows that his excesses in the vices of his times had wrought effects on his sensitive, nervous organisation, very different from what they might on the more phlegmatic constitutions of ordinary Englishmen.  In his journal, dated Venice, Feb. 2, 1821, he says,—­

’I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits,—­I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects, even of that which pleased me over night.  In about an hour or two this goes off, and I compose either to sleep again, or at least to quiet.  In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst, that I have drunk as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty,—­calculating, however, some lost from the bursting- out and effervescence and overflowing of the soda-water in drawing the corks, or striking off the necks of the bottles from mere