crous and low. That in this painful mixture he was but
too true to human nature, the testimony of De Retz (himself an
eye-witness of such an event) attests:--"Vous ne pouvez vous imaginer
(says the Cardinal) l'horreur d'une grande tempete;--vous en pouvez
imaginer aussi pen le ridicule." But, assuredly, a poet less
wantoning in the variety of his power, and less proud of displaying
it, would have paused ere he mixed up, thus mockingly, the
degradation of humanity with its sufferings, and, content to probe us
to the core with the miseries of our fellow-men, would have forborne
to wring from us, the next moment, a bitter smile at their baseness.

To the moral sense so dangerous are the effects of this quality, that
it would hardly, perhaps, be generalising too widely to assert that
wheresoever great versatility of power exists, there will also be
found a tendency to versatility of principle. The poet Chatterton, in
whose soul the seeds of all that is good and bad in genius so
prematurely ripened, said, in the consciousness of this multiple
faculty, that he "held that man in contempt who could not write on
both sides of a question;" and it was by acting in accordance with
this principle himself that he brought one of the few stains upon his
name which a life so short afforded time to incur. Mirabeau, too,
when, in the legal warfare between his father and mother, he helped
to draw up for each the pleadings against the other, was influenced
less, no doubt, by the pleasure of mischief than by this pride of
talent, and lost sight of the unnatural perfidy of the task in the
adroitness with which he executed it.

The quality which I have here denominated versatility, as applied to
_power_, Lord Byron has himself designated by the French word
"mobility," as applied to _feeling_ and _conduct_; and, in one of the
Cantos of Don Juan, has described happily some of its lighter
features. After telling us that his hero had begun to doubt, from the
great predominance of this quality in her, "how much of Adeline was
_real_," he says,--

"So well she acted, all and every part,
By turns,--with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err--'tis merely what is called mobility,
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false--though true; for surely they're sincerest,
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest."

That he was fully a