excitement of thus
acting upon the imaginations of others, he would not have hinted that
he had been guilty; and it has sometimes occurred to me that the
occult cause of his lady's separation from him, round which herself
and her legal adviser have thrown such formidable mystery, may have
been nothing more, after all, than some imposture of this kind, some
dimly hinted confession of undefined horrors, which, though intended
by the relater but to mystify and surprise, the hearer so little
understood him as to take in sober seriousness.

[Footnote 1: We have seen how often, in his Journals and Letters,
this suspicion of his own mental soundness is intimated. A similar
notion, with respect to himself, seems to have taken hold also of the
strong mind of Johnson, who, like Byron, too, was disposed to
attribute to an hereditary tinge that melancholy which, as he said,
"made him mad all his life, at least not sober." This peculiar
feature of Johnson's mind has, in the late new edition of Boswell's
Life of him, given rise to some remarks, pregnant with all the
editor's well known acuteness, which, as bearing on a point so
important in the history of the human intellect, will be found worthy
of all attention.

In one of the many letters of Lord Byron to myself, which I have
thought right to omit, I find him tracing this supposed disturbance
of his own faculties to the marriage of Miss Chaworth;--"a marriage,"
he says, "for which she sacrificed the prospects of two very ancient
families, and a heart which was hers from ten years old, and a head
which has never been quite right since."]

[Footnote 2: In his Diary of 1814 there is a passage (vol. ii. page
270.) which I had preserved solely for the purpose of illustrating
this obliquity of his mind, intending, at the same time, to accompany
it with an explanatory note. From some inadvertence, however, the
note was omitted; and, thus left to itself, this piece of
mystification has, with the French readers of the work, I see,
succeeded most perfectly; there being no imaginable variety of murder
which the votaries of the new romantic school have not been busily
extracting out of the mystery of that passage.]

This strange propensity with which the man was, as it were,
inoculated by the poet, re-acted back again upon his poetry, so as to
produce, in some of his delineations of character, that inconsistency
which has not unfrequently been noticed by his critics,--namely, the
junct