ep peace among themselves. If they can
but have sense to do this, I think that they will be a match and
better for any force that can be brought against them for the
present. We are all doing as well as we can."

It will be perceived from these letters, that besides the great and
general interests of the cause, which were in themselves sufficient
to absorb all his thoughts, he was also met on every side, in the
details of his duty, by every possible variety of obstruction and
distraction that rapacity, turbulence, and treachery could throw in
his way. Such vexations, too, as would have been trying to the most
robust health, here fell upon a frame already marked out for death;
nor can we help feeling, while we contemplate this last scene of his
life, that, much as there is in it to admire, to wonder at, and glory
in, there is also much that awakens sad and most distressful
thoughts. In a situation more than any other calling for sympathy and
care, we see him cast among strangers and mercenaries, without either
nurse or friend;--the self-collectedness of woman being, as we shall
find, wanting for the former office, and the youth and inexperience
of Count Gamba unfitting him wholly for the other. The very firmness
with which a position so lone and disheartening was sustained,
serves, by interesting us more deeply in the man, to increase our
sympathy, till we almost forget admiration in pity, and half regret
that he should have been great at such a cost.

The only circumstances that had for some time occurred to give him
pleasure were, as regarded public affairs, the news of the successful
progress of the Loan, and, in his personal relations, some favourable
intelligence which he had received, after a long interruption of
communication, respecting his sister and daughter. The former, he
learned, had been seriously indisposed at the very time of his own
fit, but had now entirely recovered. While delighted at this news, he
could not help, at the same time, remarking, with his usual tendency
to such superstitious feelings, how strange and striking was the
coincidence.

To those who have, from his childhood, traced him through these
pages, it must be manifest, I think, that Lord Byron was not formed
to be long-lived. Whether from any hereditary defect in his
organisation,--as he himself, from the circumstance of both his
parents having died young, concluded,--or from those violent means he
so early took to counteract the na