At this time Malta was in great prosperity. Her commerce was flourishing; and the goodly clusters of its profits hung ripe and rich at every door. The merchants were truly hospitable, and few more so than Mr Chabot. As I had letters to him, he invited me to dinner, along with several other friends previously engaged. In the cool of the evening, as we were sitting at our wine, Lord Byron and Mr Hobhouse were announced. His Lordship was in better spirits than I had ever seen him. His appearance showed, as he entered the room, that they had met with some adventure, and he chuckled with an inward sense of enjoyment, not altogether without spleen—a kind of malicious satisfaction—as his companion recounted with all becoming gravity their woes and sufferings, as an apology for begging a bed and morsel for the night. God forgive me! but I partook of Byron’s levity at the idea of personages so consequential wandering destitute in the streets, seeking for lodgings, as it were, from door to door, and rejected at all.

Next day, however, they were accommodated by the Governor with an agreeable house in the upper part of Valetta; and his Lordship, as soon as they were domiciled, began to take lessons in Arabic from a monk—I believe one of the librarians of the public library. His whole time was not, however, devoted to study; for he formed an acquaintance with Mrs Spencer Smith, the lady of the gentleman of that name, who had been our resident minister at Constantinople: he affected a passion for her; but it was only Platonic. She, however, beguiled him of his valuable yellow diamond ring. She is the Florence of Childe Harold, and merited the poetical embalmment, or rather the amber immortalisation, she possesses there—being herself a heroine. There was no exaggeration in saying that many incidents of her life would appear improbable in fiction. Her adventures with the Marquis de Salvo form one of the prettiest romances in the Italian language; everything in her destiny was touched with adventure: nor was it the least of her claims to sympathy that she had incurred the special enmity of Napoleon.

After remaining about three weeks at Malta, Byron embarked with his friend in a brig of war, appointed to convoy a fleet of small merchantmen to Prevesa. I had, about a fortnight before, passed over with the packet on her return from Messina to Girgenti, and did not fall in with them again till the following spring, when we met at Athens. In the meantime, besides his Platonic dalliance with Mrs Spencer Smith, Byron had involved himself in a quarrel with an officer; but it was satisfactorily settled.

His residence at Malta did not greatly interest him. The story of its chivalrous masters made no impression on his imagination—none that appears in his works—but it is not the less probable that the remembrance of the place itself occupied a deep niche in his bosom: for I have remarked, that he had a voluntary power of forgetfulness, which, on more than one occasion, struck me as singular: and I am led in consequence to think, that something unpleasant, connected with this quarrel, may have been the cause of his suppression of all direct allusion to the island. It was impossible that his imagination could avoid the impulses of the spirit which haunts the walls and ramparts of Malta; and the silence of his muse on a topic so rich in romance, and so well calculated to awaken associations concerning the knights, in unison with the ruminations of Childe Harold, persuades me that there must have been some specific cause for the omission. If it were nothing in the duel, I should be inclined to say, notwithstanding the seeming improbability of the notion, that it was owing to some curious modification of vindictive spite. It might not be that Malta should receive no celebrity from his pen; but assuredly he had met with something there which made him resolute to forget the place. The question as to what it was, he never answered the result would throw light into the labyrinths of his character.