poets, who have been the honor of their sex, proud of their husbands,
and living only for them. Ought not these examples at least to destroy
the absolute nature of the theory, making it at best conditional? The
larger number of great men, it is true, did not marry; of this number
we find, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes,
Voltaire, Pope, Alfieri, and Canova; and many others among the poets and
philosophers, Bacon, Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, and Leibnitz.

What does that prove, if not that they either would not or could not
marry, but certainly not that they were incapable of being good
husbands? Besides, a thousand causes--apart from the fear of being
unhappy in domestic life, considerations of fortune, prior attachments,
etc.--may have prevented them. But as to Lord Byron, at least, it is
still more certain with regard to him than to any other, that he might
have been happy had he made a better choice: if circumstances had only
been tolerable, as he himself says. Lord Byron had none of those faults
that often disturb harmony, because they put the wife's virtue to too
great a trial. If the best disposition, according to a deep moralist, is
that which gives much and exacts nothing, then assuredly his deserves to
be so characterized. Lord Byron exacted nothing for himself. Moreover,
discussion, contradiction, teasing, were insupportable to him; his
amiable jesting way even precluded them. In all the circumstances and
all the details of his life he displayed that high generosity, that
contempt of petty, selfish, material calculations so well adapted for
gaining hearts in general, and especially those of women. Add to that
the _prestige_ belonging to his great beauty, his wit, his grace, and it
will be easy to understand the love he must have inspired as soon as he
became known.

"Pope remarks," says Moore, "that extraordinary geniuses have the
misfortune to be admired rather than loved; but I can say, from my own
personal experience, that Lord Byron was an exception to this
rule."[143]

Nevertheless, Lord Byron, though exceptional in so many things, yet
belonged to the first order of geniuses. Therefore he could not escape
some of the laws belonging to these first-rate natures: certain habits,
tendencies, sentiments--I may almost say infirmities--of genius deriving
their _origin from the same sympathies, the same wants_.

He required to have certain things granted to him: his hours