ed, and to this very circumstance,
perhaps, owing their failure, on a severe classic model, the most
uncongenial to his own habits and temperament, and the most remote
from that bold, unshackled license which it had been the great
mission of his genius, throughout the whole realms of Mind, to
assert.

In contrast to all these high-toned strains, and struck off during
the same fertile period, we find his Don Juan--in itself an epitome
of all the marvellous contrarieties of his character--the Vision of
Judgment, the Translation from Pulci, the Pamphlets on Pope, on the
British Review, on Blackwood,--together with a swarm of other light,
humorous trifles, all flashing forth carelessly from the same mind
that was, almost at the same moment, personating, with a port worthy
of such a presence, the mighty spirit of Dante, or following the dark
footsteps of Scepticism over the ruins of past worlds, with Cain.

All this time, too, while occupied with these ideal creations, the
demands upon his active sympathies, in real life, were such as almost
any mind but his own would have found sufficient to engross its every
thought and feeling. An amour, not of that light, transient kind
which "goes without a burden," but, on the contrary, deep-rooted
enough to endure to the close of his days, employed as restlessly
with its first hopes and fears a portion of this period as with the
entanglements to which it led, political and domestic, it embarrassed
the remainder. Scarcely, indeed, had this disturbing passion begun to
calm, when a new source of excitement presented itself in that
conspiracy into which he flung himself so fearlessly, and which
ended, as we have seen, but in multiplying the objects of his
sympathy and protection, and driving him to a new change of home and
scene.

When we consider all these distractions that beset him, taking into
account also the frequent derangement of his health, and the time and
temper he must have thrown away on the minute drudgery of watching
over every item of his household expenditure, the mind is lost in
almost incredulous astonishment at the wonders he was able to achieve
under such circumstances--at the variety and prodigality of power
with which, in the midst of such interruptions and hinderances, his
"bright soul broke out on every side," and not only held on its
course, unclogged, through all these difficulties, but even extracted
out of the very struggles and annoyances it encountered n