ever," &c.

Among the causes--if not rather among the results--of that disposition
to melancholy, which, after all, perhaps, naturally belonged to his
temperament, must not be forgotten those sceptical views of religion,
which clouded, as has been shown, his boyish thoughts, and, at the
time of which I am speaking, gathered still more darkly over his mind.
In general we find the young too ardently occupied with the
enjoyments which this life gives or promises to afford either leisure
or inclination for much enquiry into the mysteries of the next. But
with him it was unluckily otherwise; and to have, at once, anticipated
the worst experience both of the voluptuary and the reasoner,--to have
reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world's pleasures, and
see nothing but "clouds and darkness" beyond, was the doom, the
anomalous doom, which a nature, premature in all its passions and
powers, inflicted on Lord Byron.

When Pope, at the age of five-and-twenty, complained of being weary of
the world, he was told by Swift that he "had not yet acted or suffered
enough in the world to have become weary of it."[111] But far
different was the youth of Pope and of Byron;--what the former but
anticipated in thought, the latter had drunk deep of in reality;--at
an age when the one was but looking forth on the sea of life, the
other had plunged in, and tried its depths. Swift himself, in whom
early disappointments and wrongs had opened a vein of bitterness that
never again closed, affords a far closer parallel to the fate of our
noble poet,[112] as well in the untimeliness of the trials he had
been doomed to encounter, as in the traces of their havoc which they
left in his character.

That the romantic fancy of youth, which courts melancholy as an
indulgence, and loves to assume a sadness it has not had time to earn,
may have had some share in, at least, fostering the gloom by which the
mind of the young poet was overcast, I am not disposed to deny. The
circumstance, indeed, of his having, at this time, among the ornaments
of his study, a number of skulls highly polished, and placed on light
stands round the room, would seem to indicate that he rather courted
than shunned such gloomy associations.[113] Being a sort of boyish
mimickry, too, of the use to which the poet Young is said to have
applied a skull, such a display might well induce some suspicion of
the sincerity of his gloom, did we not, through the whole course of
h