It was in the old days, when a certain famous anarchist club held its meetings in a house in one of the dismal streets abutting on the Tottenham Court Road. An evening paper had asked me to write an article about the club. An Italian waiter, whom the proprietors of a West-End cafe were protecting from the Milan police, introduced me to it as his guest; and there, in an atmosphere of pipes and lager-beer, I met Stromboli. His full name, sprawling in true cosmopolitan fashion over three languages, was Jean Antoine Stromboli Kosnapulski; but Stromboli is as much of it as I have ever been able to...

Whether a book is called "The Love Affairs of Lord Byron" or "The Life of Lord Byron" can make very little difference to the contents of its pages. Byron's love affairs were the principal incidents of his life, and almost the only ones. Like Chateaubriand, he might have spoke of "a procession of women" as the great panoramic effect of his career. He differed from Chateaubriand, however, in the first place, in not professing to be very much concerned by the pageant, and, in the second place, in being, in reality, very deeply affected by it.