quate to his desires, and his talents were
not of an order to redeem the deficiencies of fortune. It likewise
so happened that while indulged by his only friend, his mother, to an
excess that impaired the manliness of his character, her conduct was
such as in no degree to merit the affection which her wayward
fondness inspired.

It is impossible to reflect on the boyhood of Byron without regret.
There is not one point in it all which could, otherwise than with
pain, have affected a young mind of sensibility. His works bear
testimony, that, while his memory retained the impressions of early
youth, fresh and unfaded, there was a gloom and shadow upon them,
which proved how little they had been really joyous.

The riper years of one so truly the nursling of pride, poverty, and
pain, could only be inconsistent, wild, and impassioned, even had his
temperament been moderate and well disciplined. But when it is
considered that in addition to all the awful influences of these
fatalities, for they can receive no lighter name, he possessed an
imagination of unbounded capacity--was inflamed with those
indescribable feelings which constitute, in the opinion of many, the
very elements of genius--fearfully quick in the discernment of the
darker qualities of character--and surrounded by temptation--his
career ceases to surprise. It would have been more wonderful had he
proved an amiable and well-conducted man, than the questionable and
extraordinary being who has alike provoked the malice and interested
the admiration of the world.

Posterity, while acknowledging the eminence of his endowments, and
lamenting the habits which his unhappy circumstances induced, will
regard it as a curious phenomenon in the fortunes of the individual,
that the progress of his fame as a poet should have been so similar
to his history as a man.

His first attempts, though displaying both originality and power,
were received with a contemptuous disdain, as cold and repulsive as
the penury and neglect which blighted the budding of his youth. The
unjust ridicule in the review of his first poems, excited in his
spirit a discontent as inveterate as the feeling which sprung from
his deformity: it affected, more or less, all his conceptions to
such a degree that he may be said to have hated the age which had
joined in the derision, as he cherished an antipathy against those
persons who looked curiously at his foot. Childe Harold, the most
triumphant