Byron's celebrity, recently charted by Tom Mole from his 1812 An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill, to the self-conscious scrutiny and deployment in Don Juan, is filled with souvenirs, gifts exchanged, tokens kept and transformed by the keeping. Many of these souvenirs are body parts, such as the blood on Tom's handkerchief meant as a final keep-sake for his Sal that falls, undelivered, as part of Byron's meditation on the ethereality of fame (Don Juan, Canto XI). Caroline Lamb sent him a keepsake of her pubic hair, enclosed with a letter that demands yet recants reciprocity: 'I asked you not to send blood but Yet do--because if it means I like to have it. I cut the hair too close & bled much more than you need--do not you the same & pray put not scissors points near where quei capelli [those hairss''] grow--sooner take it from the arm or wrist--pray be careful (qtd. in Tuite 59). Pointing out that this letter accompanied a note decorated with hearts, crosses and ciphers, Clare Tuite describes the offering as piquant tokens of tainted love (60). A mourning public reproduced Lamb's linguistic re-articulation of Byron's body--arm, wrist, phallus, hair, blood--in the relic hunting that followed his death, when the body itself, his heart, his skull, as well as various articles of clothing, were sought after and endlessly reimagined, much as Byron himself, visiting Waterloo, purchased a brass cuirass, a helmet with a plume, and a sword, and later supplemented his luggage with the bones of Burgundian soldiers which he had carried away from a chapel at Morat (Pascoe 88, 90). (1) As Mole comments, the Byronic body, the subject of recollection and collection, not the natural, pre-discursive ground on which Byron's was built, but was rather shaped as part of the apparatus of celebrity (74). Hair, blood, heart all had conventional deployments in history, an tiquarianism, and literature, and Byron, his public, and his handlers mobilized such allusions in the construction of his celebrity. Even before achieving fame, Byron worked such conventions within his personal relationships: at least three of his early poems respond to receiving gifts of hair and the debt Byron acquires by accepting them. When the chorister John Edelston gave him a cornelian heart, Byron wrote a commemorating poem: No specious splendour of this stone Endears it to my memory ever; With lustre only once it shone, blushes modest as the giver. // ... This pledge attentively I view'd, And sparkling as I held it near, Methought one drop the stone bedew'd, And, ever since, I've lov'd a tear. (1-4, 13-16) The poem locates value not in the splendor of the stone, but in the recollection of how a tear--another bodily fluid akin to blood--animated it at the moment of exchange. (2) Or perhaps the tear is an illusion, and hence the methought. This uncertainty reiterates the central tension of the poem, in which the gift-giving is, like poetic reception, a doubtful, anxious moment of interpretation. Where Edleston fears Byron might refuse the gift, Byron worries he might lose it and thereby undermine his own emotional attachments. His solution to this worry brings us to the small village of Southwell, where Byron spent formative years honing himself--and his body--for the fame which was to come. He gave the cornelian heart to Elizabeth Pigot, whom he befriended in Southwell, although whether as a gift or for safe-keeping is unclear. Byron wrote Pigot about Edelston several times, using the confidentiality of the one friendship to deepen the other. In one letter, Byron collapses the distinction between gift and gift-giver, his own tears reciprocating for a gift no longer possessed: At this moment I write with a bottle of claret in my head and tears in my eyes; for I have just parted with my 'Cornelian,'' who spent the evening with me ... I rejoice to hear you are interested in my protege (Moore I: 162-3). …