ut a pint of
bucellas, and fish. Meat I never touch, nor much vegetable diet. I
wish I were in the country, to take exercise, instead of being obliged
to cool by abstinence, in lieu of it. I should not so much mind a
little accession of flesh: my bones can well bear it. But the worst
is, the Devil always came with it, till I starved him out; and I will
not be the slave of any appetite. If I do err, it shall be my heart,
at least, that heralds the way. O my head! how it aches! The horrors
of digestion! I wonder how Bonaparte's dinner agrees with
him.'--Moore's Life, vol. ii. p.264.

From all the contemporary history and literature of the times, therefore,
we have reason to believe that Lord Byron spoke the exact truth when he
said to Medwin,--

'My own master at an age when I most required a guide, left to the
dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune
anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution
impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a
joyless indifference to the world and all that was before
me.'--Medwin's Conversations, p.42.

Utter prostration of the whole physical man from intemperate excess, the
deadness to temptation which comes from utter exhaustion, was his
condition, according to himself and Moore, when he first left England, at
twenty-one years of age.

In considering his subsequent history, we are to take into account that
it was upon the brain and nerve-power, thus exhausted by early excess,
that the draughts of sudden and rapid literary composition began to be
made. There was something unnatural and unhealthy in the rapidity,
clearness, and vigour with which his various works followed each other.
Subsequently to the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold,' 'The Bride of
Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'The Giaour,' 'Lara,' 'Parisina,' and 'The Siege
of Corinth,' all followed close upon each other, in a space of less than
three years, and those the three most critical years of his life. 'The
Bride of Abydos' came out in the autumn of 1813, and was written in a
week; and 'The Corsair' was composed in thirteen days. A few months more
than a year before his marriage, and the brief space of his married life,
was the period in which all this literary labour was performed, while yet
he was running the wild career of intrigue and fashionable folly. He
speaks of 'Lara' as being tossed off in t