D'Orsay, she adds, at the first interview, had struck Byron as a person of considerable talents and wonderful acquirements for a man of his age and former pursuits. "Byron from the first liked D'Orsay; he was clever, original, unpretending; he affected to be nothing that he was not."
Byron sat for his portrait to D'Orsay, that portrait which subsequently appeared in the "New Monthly Magazine," and afterward as a frontispiece of her ladyship's work, "Conversations with Lord Byron."
His lordship suffered Lady Blessington to lecture him in prose, and, what was worse, in verse. He endeavored to persuade Lord Blessington to prolong his stay in Genoa, and to take a residence adjoining his own named "Il Paradiso." And a rumor of his intention to take the place for himself, and some good-natured friend observing, "Il diavolo è ancora entrato in Paradiso," his lordship wrote the following lines:—
Beneath Blessington's eyes
The reclaimed Paradise
Should be free as the former from evil;
But if the new Eve
For an apple should grieve,
What mortal would not play the devil?
But the original conceit was not in poetry.
Lady Blessington informed me that, on the occasion of a masked ball to be given in Genoa, Byron stated his intention of going there, and asked her ladyship to accompany him: en badinant about the character she was to go in, some one had suggested that of Eve—
