Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/129

 preceding evening Scrope and he had swallowed six bottles of burgundy and claret. Scrope became unwell and he was "rather feverish." On another night, 27 March 1814, the night before Byron moved into the Albany, Davies and he dined tête-à-tête at the Cocoa Tree. Their hours this time were from six to midnight and they drank between them one bottle of champagne and six of claret. The effect of this dinner was to make Davies tipsy and pious. Byron left him "on his knees praying to I know not what purpose." On the night of the appearance of the number of the Edinburgh Review containing the celebrated denunciation of the "Hours of Idleness," Byron dined alone with Davies. He acknowledged to have consumed three bottles of claret. Medwin records in his conversations (p. 95) that Davies, H—— and Byron clubbed together £19, all the loose cash that they had in their pockets and lost it in playing chicken hazard at a hell in St. James's Street. The usual result followed. They all got drunk together till H—— and Davies quarrelled. Scrope afterwards wrote to Byron for his pistols so that he might shoot himself, but Byron declined to lend them "on the plea that they would be forfeited as a deodand." Attempts at suicide under losses in betting afterwards became a mania with him.

Strange people found themselves in the lodgings of Scrope Davies in St. James's Street. It was there that Byron came one morning in a towering passion and standing before the fire broke out with the exclamation "Damn all women and that woman [lady Frances Wedderburn] in particular." He then tore from his watch-ribbon a seal which she had given him and dashed it into the grate. Scrope also claimed to be high in her favours and when Hodgson's letters were sold by Sotheby and Wilkinson on 2 March 1885, lot 10 was a letter from him written in