have afforded a still more grand and precious result. Had the
minds of Milton and Tasso been thus thrown open to the incursions of
light, ludicrous fancies, who can doubt that those solemn sanctuaries
of genius would have been as much injured as profaned by the
intrusion?--and it is at least a question whether, if Lord Byron had
not been so actively versatile, so totally under the dominion of

"A fancy, like the air, most free,
And full of mutability,"

he would not have been less wonderful, perhaps, but more great.

Nor was it only in his poetical creations that this love and power of
variety showed itself:--one of the most pervading weaknesses of his
life may be traced to the same fertile source. The pride of
personating every description of character, evil as well as good,
influenced but too much, as we have seen, his ambition, and, not a
little, his conduct; and as, in poetry, his own experience of the ill
effects of passion was made to minister materials to the workings of
his imagination, so, in return, his imagination supplied that dark
colouring under which he so often disguised his true aspect from the
world. To such a perverse length, indeed, did he carry this fancy for
self-defamation, that if (as sometimes, in his moments of gloom, he
persuaded himself,) there was any tendency to derangement in his
mental conformation[1], on this point alone could it be pronounced to
have manifested itself.[2] In the early part of my acquaintance with
him, when he most gave way to this humour,--for it was observable
afterwards, when the world joined in his own opinion of himself, he
rather shrunk from the echo,--I have known him more than once, as we
have sat together after dinner, and he was, at the time, perhaps, a
little under the influence of wine, to fall seriously into this sort
of dark and self-accusing mood, and throw out hints of his past life
with an air of gloom and mystery designed evidently to awaken
curiosity and interest. He was, however, too promptly alive to the
least approaches of ridicule not to perceive, on these occasions,
that the gravity of his hearer was only prevented from being
disturbed by an effort of politeness, and he accordingly never again
tried this romantic mystification upon me. From what I have known,
however, of his experiments upon more impressible listeners, I have
little doubt that, to produce effect at the moment, there is hardly
any crime so dark or desperate of which, in the