igh or low, brings into one's mind. Whether I am with
the wise or the waggish, among poets or among pugilists, over the
book or over the bottle, you are sure to connect yourself
transcendently with all, and come 'armed for _every_ field' into my
memory."]

So much did this extreme mobility,--this readiness to be "strongly
acted on by what was nearest,"--abound in his disposition, that, even
with the casual acquaintances of the hour, his heart was upon his
lips[1], and it depended wholly upon themselves whether they might
not become at once the depositories of every secret, if it might be
so called, of his whole life. That in this convergence of all the
powers of pleasing towards present objects, those absent should be
sometimes forgotten, or, what is worse, sacrificed to the reigning
desire of the moment, is unluckily one of the alloys attendant upon
persons of this temperament, which renders their fidelity, either as
lovers or confidants, not a little precarious. But of the charm which
such a disposition diffuses through the manner there can be but
little doubt,--and least of all among those who have ever felt its
influence in Lord Byron. Neither are the instances in which he has
been known to make imprudent disclosures of what had been said or
written by others of the persons with whom he was conversing to be
all set down to this rash overflow of the social hour. In his own
frankness of spirit, and hatred of all disguise, this practice,
pregnant as it was with inconvenience, and sometimes danger, in a
great degree originated. To confront the accused with the accuser
was, in such cases, his delight,--not only as a revenge for having
been made the medium of what men durst not say openly to each other,
but as a gratification of that love of small mischief which he had
retained from boyhood, and which the confusion that followed such
exposures was always sure to amuse. This habit, too, being, as I have
before remarked, well known to his friends, their sense of prudence,
if not their fairness, was put fully on its guard, and he himself was
spared the pain of hearing what he could not, without inflicting
still worse, repeat.

[Footnote 1: It is curious to observe how, in all times, and all
countries, what is called the poetical temperament has, in the great
possessors, and victims, of that gift, produced similar effects. In
the following passage, the biographer of Tasso has, in painting that
poet, described Byron also:--