n inseparable consequence of the vast predominance
of exalted passion over reflection, which is one of the revolutionary
marks. Byron was fundamentally and substantially, as has been already
said, one of the most rational of men. Hence when the passionate fit
grew cold, as it always does in temperaments so mixed, he wanted for
perfect strength a justification in thought. There are men whose being
is so universally possessed by phantasies, that they never feel this
necessity of reconciling the visions of excited emotion with the ideas
of ordered reason. Byron was more vigorously constituted, and his
susceptibility to the necessity of this reconciliation combined with
his inability to achieve it, to produce that cynicism which the simple
charity of vulgar opinion attributes to the possession of him by unclean
devils. It was his refuge, as it sometimes is with smaller men, from the
disquieting confusion which was caused by the disproportion between his
visions and aspirations, and his intellectual means for satisfying
himself seriously as to their true relations and substantive value. Only
the man arrives at practical strength who is convinced, whether rightly
or wrongly, that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to be
known. Byron never did thus know himself, either morally or
intellectually. The higher part of him was consciously dragged down by
the degrading reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its
connections and associations; they hung like miasma over his spirit. He
could not rise to that sublimest height of moral fervour, when a man
intrepidly chases from his memory past evil done, suppresses the
recollection of old corruptions, declares that he no longer belongs to
them nor they to him, and is not frightened by the past from a firm and
lofty respect for present dignity and worth. It is a good thing thus to
overthrow the tyranny of the memory, and to cast out the body of our
dead selves. That Byron never attained this good, though he was not
unlikely to have done so if he had lived longer, does not prove that he
was too gross to feel its need, but it explains a moral weakness which
has left a strange and touching mark on some of his later works.

So in the intellectual order, he knew too much in one sense, and in
another too little. The strong man is not conscious of gaps and
cataclysms in the structure of his belief, or else he would in so far
instantly cease to be strong. One living, as Byron emp