ember, being called up to town by
business, I had opportunities, from being a good deal in my noble
friend's society, of observing the state of his mind and feelings, under
the prospect of the important change he was now about to undergo; and it
was with pain I found that those sanguine hopes[51] with which I had
sometimes looked forward to the happy influence of marriage, in winning
him over to the brighter and better side of life, were, by a view of all
the circumstances of his present destiny, considerably diminished;
while, at the same time, not a few doubts and misgivings, which had
never before so strongly occurred to me, with regard to his own fitness,
under any circumstances, for the matrimonial tie, filled me altogether
with a degree of foreboding anxiety as to his fate, which the
unfortunate events that followed but too fully justified.

The truth is, I fear, that rarely, if ever, have men of the higher order
of genius shown themselves fitted for the calm affections and comforts
that form the cement of domestic life. "One misfortune (says Pope) of
extraordinary geniuses is, that their very friends are more apt to
admire than love them." To this remark there have, no doubt, been
exceptions,--and I should pronounce Lord Byron, from my own experience,
to be one of them,--but it would not be difficult, perhaps, to show,
from the very nature and pursuits of genius, that such must generally be
the lot of all pre-eminently gifted with it; and that the same qualities
which enable them to command admiration are also those that too often
incapacitate them from conciliating love.

The very habits, indeed, of abstraction and self-study to which the
occupations of men of genius lead, are, in themselves, necessarily, of
an unsocial and detaching tendency, and require a large portion of
indulgence from others not to be set down as unamiable. One of the chief
sources, too, of sympathy and society between ordinary mortals being
their dependence on each other's intellectual resources, the operation
of this social principle must naturally be weakest in those whose own
mental stores are most abundant and self-sufficing, and who, rich in
such materials for thinking within themselves, are rendered so far
independent of any aid from others. It was this solitary luxury (which
Plato called "banqueting his own thoughts") that led Pope, as well as
Lord Byron, to prefer the silence and seclusion of his library to the
most agreeable conv