On the subject of the negotiations for a change of ministry which took place during this session, I find the following anecdotes recorded in his notebook:—­

“At the opposition meeting of the peers in 1812, at Lord Grenville’s, when Lord Grey and he read to us the correspondence upon Moira’s negotiation, I sate next to the present Duke of Grafton, and said, ’What is to be done next?’—­’Wake the Duke of Norfolk’ (who was snoring away near us), replied he:  ’I don’t think the negotiators have left any thing else for us to do this turn.’

“In the debate, or rather discussion, afterwards in the House of Lords upon that very question, I sate immediately behind Lord Moira, who was extremely annoyed at Grey’s speech upon the subject; and, while Grey was speaking, turned round to me repeatedly, and asked me whether I agreed with him.  It was an awkward question to me who had not heard both sides.  Moira kept repeating to me, ‘It was not so, it was so and so,’ &c.  I did not know very well what to think, but I sympathised with the acuteness of his feelings upon the subject.”

The subject of the Catholic claims was, it is well known, brought forward a second time this session by Lord Wellesley, whose motion for a future consideration of the question was carried by a majority of one.  In reference to this division, another rather amusing anecdote is thus related.

“Lord * * affects an imitation of two very different Chancellors, Thurlow and Loughborough, and can indulge in an oath now and then.  On one of the debates on the Catholic question, when we were either equal or within one (I forget which), I had been sent for in great haste to a ball, which I quitted, I confess, somewhat reluctantly, to emancipate five millions of people.  I came in late, and did not go immediately into the body of the House, but stood just behind the woolsack. * * turned round, and, catching my eye, immediately said to a peer, (who had come to him for a few minutes on the woolsack, as is the custom of his friends,) ’Damn them! they’ll have it now,—­by G——­d! the vote that is just come in will give it them.’”

During all this time, the impression which he had produced in society, both as a poet and a man, went on daily increasing; and the facility with which he gave himself up to the current of fashionable life, and mingled in all the gay scenes through which it led, showed that the novelty, at least, of this mode of existence had charms for him, however he might estimate its pleasures.  That sort of vanity which is almost inseparable from genius, and which consists in an extreme sensitiveness on the subject of self, Lord Byron, I need not say, possessed in no ordinary degree; and never was there a career in which this sensibility to the opinions of others was exposed to more constant and various excitement than that on which he was now entered.  I find in a note of my own to him, written at this period, some jesting