iassed
on some occasions by others,--all its various impulses and tendencies
will be found to radiate. In Lord Byron, however, this sort of pivot
of character was almost wholly wanting. Governed as he was at
different moments by totally different passions, and impelled
sometimes, as during his short access of parsimony in Italy, by
springs of action never before developed in his nature, in him this
simple mode of tracing character to its sources must be often wholly
at fault; and if, as is not impossible, in trying to solve the
strange variances of his mind, I should myself be found to have
fallen into contradictions and inconsistencies, the extreme
difficulty of analysing, without dazzle or bewilderment, such an
unexampled complication of qualities must be admitted as my excuse.

So various, indeed, and contradictory, were his attributes, both
moral and intellectual, that he may be pronounced to have been not
one, but many: nor would it be any great exaggeration of the truth to
say, that out of the mere partition of the properties of his single
mind a plurality of characters, all different and all vigorous, might
have been furnished. It was this multiform aspect exhibited by him
that led the world, during his short wondrous career, to compare him
with that medley host of personages, almost all differing from each
other, which he thus playfully enumerates in one of his Journals:--

"I have been thinking over, the other day, on the various
comparisons, good or evil, which I have seen published of myself in
different journals, English and foreign. This was suggested to me by
accidentally turning over a foreign one lately,--for I have made it a
rule latterly never to _search_ for any thing of the kind, but not to
avoid the perusal, if presented by chance.

"To begin, then: I have seen myself compared, personally or
poetically, in English, French, _German_ (_as_ interpreted to me),
Italian, and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau,
Goethe, Young, Aretine, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, 'an
alabaster vase, lighted up within,' Satan, Shakspeare, Buonaparte,
Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin, the Clown,
Sternhold and Hopkins, to the phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to
Chenier, to Mirabeau, to young R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael
Angelo, to Raphael, to a petit-maitre, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold,
to Lara, to the Count in Beppo, to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden, to
Burns, to Savage