From lips that now may seem imbued with gall,
Nor fools nor follies tempt me to despise
The meanest thing that crawl'd beneath my eyes.
But now so callous grown, so changed from youth," &c.

Some of the causes that worked this change in his character have been
intimated in the course of the preceding pages. That there was no
tinge of bitterness in his natural disposition, we have abundant
testimony, besides his own, to prove. Though, as a child, occasionally
passionate and headstrong, his docility and kindness towards those who
were themselves kind, is acknowledged by all; and "playful" and
"affectionate" are invariably the epithets by which those who knew him
in his childhood convey their impression of his character.

Of all the qualities, indeed, of his nature, affectionateness seems
to have been the most ardent and most deep. A disposition, on his own
side, to form strong attachments, and a yearning desire after
affection in return, were the feeling and the want that formed the
dream and torment of his existence. We have seen with what passionate
enthusiasm he threw himself into his boyish friendships. The
all-absorbing and unsuccessful love that followed was, if I may so
say, the agony, without being the death, of this unsated desire, which
lived on through his life, and filled his poetry with the very soul of
tenderness, lent the colouring of its light to even those unworthy
ties which vanity or passion led him afterwards to form, and was the
last aspiration of his fervid spirit in those stanzas written but a
few months before his death:--

"'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it has ceased to move;
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!"

It is much, I own, to be questioned, whether, even under the most
favourable circumstances, a disposition such as I have here described
could have escaped ultimate disappointment, or found any where a
resting-place for its imaginings and desires. But, in the case of Lord
Byron, disappointment met him on the very threshold of life. His
mother, to whom his affections first, naturally with ardour, turned,
either repelled them rudely, or capriciously trifled with them. In
speaking of his early days to a friend at Genoa, a short time before
his departure for Greece, he traced the first feelings of pain and
humiliation he had ever known to the coldness with which his mother
had received his caresses in in