of our proudest temple: and shall see a
single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand
masts--her influence and her glory will still survive--fresh in
eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the
intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over
which they exercise their control.

V

THE PATHOS OF BYRON'S LIFE[61]

The pretty fable by which the Duchess of Orleans illustrates the
character of her son, the regent, might, with little change, be
applied to Byron. All the fairies, save one, had been bidden to his
cradle. All the gossips had been profuse of their gifts. One had
bestowed nobility, another genius, a third beauty. The malignant elf
who had been uninvited came last, and, unable to reverse what her
sisters had done for their favorite, had mixt up a curse with every
blessing.

He was sprung of a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and
impoverished by a series of crimes and follies, which had attained a
scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor,
and, but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The
young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound
part in his mind. He had naturally a generous and tender heart; but
his temper was irritable and wayward. He had a head which statuaries
loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the
street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the
weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and
a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest
and the most judicious training. But, capriciously as nature had
dealt with him, the relative to whom the office of forming his
character was entrusted was more capricious still. She passed from
paroxysms of rage to paroxysms of fondness. At one time she stifled
him with her caresses, at another time she insulted his deformity.

He came into the world, and the world treated him as his mother
treated him--sometimes with kindness, sometimes with severity, never
with justice. It indulged him without discrimination, and punished him
without discrimination. He was truly a spoilt child; not merely the
spoilt child of his parents, but the spoilt child of nature, the
spoilt child of fortune, the spoilt child of fame, the spoilt child of
society. His first poems[62] were received with a contempt which,
feeble as they were, they did not abso