ply the
doubts which he conceived, and more or less modify his mind, and even
give to it a tinge of skepticism.

When he left England for the first time, his mind was in this
transitory, suffering state. The various countries which he visited, the
various creeds with which he became acquainted the intolerance of the
one, the laxity in others in direct opposition to their superstitious
and irrational practices; the truly touching piety which he found in the
Greek monasteries (at Zytza and at Athens), in the midst of which and in
the silence of whose cloisters, he loved to share the peace and even the
austerities of a monkish life; his transition from the Western
countries, where reason is placed above imagination, to the East, where
the opposite is aimed at--all contributed to prevent what was
vacillating in his mind from becoming settled. Meanwhile endless
disappointments, bitter sorrows, and broken illusions contributed their
share to the pain which his mind experienced at every stage of its
philosophical inquiry, and contributed to give him, in the loneliness of
his life, a tinge of misanthropy opposed to his natural character, which
suggested the rather philosophical and generous than prudent conception
of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," where he depicts his hero as
intellectually imbued with philosophical doctrines which lead practical
minds to skepticism and materialism! These doctrines resulted in causing
"Childe Harold" to lose that traditional faith which gives peace to the
soul by insuring conviction to the mind. The poet shows the
impossibility of withdrawing himself from their disastrous results when
arrived at the age when passions assert their rule, and when in a
certain social position, they must be carried into practice. Nature not
having gifted him with a sufficiently generous heart to check the
disease of his mind, Childe Harold, _disgusted with the sins of his
youth_, no longer seeks the road to virtue, but begins to experience
with Solomon the vanity of human things, becomes a prey to satiety,
ennui, and to insensibility to both physical and moral worth.

Byron, who made the intellectual education of his day responsible for
Childe Harold's faults, had conceived this character in his earliest
days at Harrow. It was in any case, he said, a characteristic of the
youth of those days, although idealized and drawn from his own
imagination. His enemies and his rivals have endeavored to prove that
he wished t