Page:Journal of Conversations with Lord Byron.pdf/84

 tures, I hoped he would give me credit for being sincere in my admiration of them; but he was in no humor to give one credit for any thing on this occasion, as he felt that our giving a preference to seeing sights, when we might have passed the hours with him, was not flattering to his vanity. I should say that Byron was not either skilled in, or an admirer of, works of art; he confessed to me that very few had excited his attention, and that to admire these he had been forced to draw on his imagination. Of objects of taste or virtù he was equally regardless, and antiquities had no interest for him; nay, he carried this so far, that he disbelieved the possibility of their exciting interest in any one, and said that they merely served as excuses for indulging the vanity and ostentation of those who had no other means of exciting attention. Music he liked, though he was no judge of it; he often dwelt on the power of association it possessed, and declared that the notes of a well-known air could transport him to distant scenes and events, presenting objects before him with a vividness that quite banished the present. Perfumes, he said, produced the same effect, though less forcibly, and, added he, with his mocking smile, often make me quite sentimental.

Byron is of a very suspicious nature; he dreads