with the following powerful review of Lord
Byron's mind and fortune at the time he left England:--

"The circumstances under which Lord Byron now took leave of
England were such as, in the case of any ordinary person,
could not be considered otherwise than disastrous and
humiliating. He had, in the course of one short year, gone
through every variety of domestic misery;--had seen his hearth
ten times profaned by the visitations of the law, and been
only saved from a prison by the privileges of his rank. He had
alienated (if, indeed, they had ever been his) the affections
of his wife; and now, rejected by her, and condemned by the
world, was betaking himself to an exile which had not even the
dignity of appearing voluntary, as the excommunicating voice
of society seemed to leave him no other resource. Had he been
of that class of unfeeling and self-satisfied natures from
whose hard surface the reproaches of others fall pointless, he
might have found in insensibility a sure refuge against
reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that
kept him so awake to the applauses of mankind rendered him, in
a still more intense degree, alive to their censure. Even the
strange, perverse pleasures which he felt in painting himself
unamiably to the world did not prevent him from being both
startled and pained when the world took him at his word; and,
like a child in a mask before a looking-glass, the dark
semblance which he had half in sport, put on, when reflected
back upon him from the mirror of public opinion, shocked even
himself.

"Thus surrounded by vexations, and thus deeply feeling them,
it is not too much to say, that any other spirit but his own
would have sunk under the struggle, and lost, perhaps,
irrecoverably, that level of self-esteem which alone affords a
stand against the shocks of fortune. But in him,--furnished as
his mind was with reserves of strength, waiting to be called
out,--the very intensity of the pressure brought relief by the
proportionate reaction which it produced. Had his
transgressions and frailties been visited with no more than
their due portion of punishment, there can be little doubt
that a very different result would have ensued. Not only would
such an excitement have been insufficient to waken up the new
energies still dormant in h