ion of one or two lofty and shining virtues with "a thousand
crimes" altogether incompatible with them; this anomaly being, in
fact, accounted for by the two different sorts of ambition that
actuated him,--the natural one, of infusing into his personages those
high and kindly qualities he felt conscious of within himself, and
the artificial one, of investing them with those crimes which he so
boyishly wished imputed to him by the world.

Independently, however, of any such efforts towards blackening his
own name, and even after he had learned from bitter experience the
rash folly of such a system, there was still, in the openness and
over-frankness of his nature, and that indulgence of impulse with
which he gave utterance to, if not acted upon, every chance
impression of the moment, more than sufficient to bring his
character, in all its least favourable lights, before the world. Who
is there, indeed, that could bear to be judged by even the best of
those unnumbered thoughts that course each other, like waves of the
sea, through our minds, passing away unuttered, and, for the most
part, even unowned by ourselves?--Yet to such a test was Byron's
character throughout his whole life exposed. As well from the
precipitance with which he gave way to every impulse as from the
passion he had for recording his own impressions, all those
heterogeneous thoughts, fantasies, and desires that, in other men's
minds, "come like shadows, so depart," were by him fixed and embodied
as they presented themselves, and, at once, taking a shape cognizable
by public opinion, either in his actions or his words, either in the
hasty letter of the moment, or the poem for all time, laid open such
a range of vulnerable points before his judges, as no one individual
perhaps ever before, of himself, presented.

With such abundance and variety of materials for portraiture, it may
easily be conceived how two professed delineators of his character,
the one over partial and the other malicious, might,--the former, by
selecting only the fairer, and the latter only the darker,
features,--produce two portraits of Lord Byron, as much differing
from each other as they would both be, on the whole, unlike the
original.

Of the utter powerlessness of retention with which he promulgated his
every thought and feeling,--more especially if at all connected with
the subject of self,--without allowing even a pause for the almost
instinctive consideration whether by