on, of confounding together the
meanings of the words unbeliever and sceptic,--the former implying
decision of opinion, and the latter only doubt. I have myself, I
find, not always kept the significations of the two words distinct,
and in one instance have so far fallen into the notion of these
objectors as to speak of Byron in his youth as "an unbelieving
school-boy," when the word "doubting" would have more truly expressed
my meaning. With this necessary explanation, I shall here repeat my
assertion; or rather--to clothe its substance in a different
form--shall say that Lord Byron was, to the last, a sceptic, which,
in itself, implies that he was, at no time, a confirmed unbeliever.

* * * * *

"If I were to live over again, I do not know what I would change in
my life, unless it were _for--not to have lived at all_.[1] All
history and experience, and the rest, teaches us that the good and
evil are pretty equally balanced in this existence, and that what is
most to be desired is an easy passage out of it. What can it give us
but years? and those have little of good but their ending.

[Footnote 1: Swift "early adopted," says Sir Walter Scott, "the
custom of observing his birth-day, as a term, not of joy, but of
sorrow, and of reading, when it annually recurred, the striking
passage of Scripture, in which Job laments and execrates the day upon
which it was said in his father's house 'that a man-child was
born.'"--_Life of Swift._]

* * * * *

"Of the immortality of the soul it appears to me that there can be
little doubt, if we attend for a moment to the action of mind: it is
in perpetual activity. I used to doubt of it, but reflection has
taught me better. It acts also so very independent of body--in
dreams, for instance;--incoherently and _madly_, I grant you, but
still it is mind, and much more mind than when we are awake. Now that
this should not act _separately_, as well as jointly, who can
pronounce? The stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, call the
present state 'a soul which drags a carcass,'--a heavy chain, to be
sure, but all chains being material may be shaken off. How far our
future life will be _individual_, or, rather, how far it will at all
resemble _our present_ existence, is another question; but that the
mind is eternal seems as probable as that the body is not so. Of
course I here venture upon the question without recurring to
reve