no preference, we find him saving a
young girl of noble birth from the danger caused by his involuntary
fascinations.[47] In Romagna, at Pisa, in Greece, he also gave similar
proofs of virtue and of his delicate sense of honor.

Let us now examine his words. In 1813, with regard to "The
Monk," by Lewis, which he had just read, Lord Byron wrote in his
memoranda:--"These descriptions might be written by Tiberius, at
Caprera. They are overdrawn; the essence of vicious voluptuousness. As
to me, I can not conceive how they could come from the pen of a man of
twenty, for Lewis was only that age when he wrote 'The Monk.' These
pages are not natural; they distill cantharides.

"I had never read this work, and have just been looking over it out of
sheer curiosity, from a remembrance of the noise the book made, and the
name it gave Lewis. But really such things can not even be dangerous."

About the same period Mr. Allen, a friend of Lord Holland, very
learned--a perfect Magliabecchi--a devourer of books, and an observer of
mankind, lent Lord Byron a quantity of unpublished letters by the poet
Burns--letters that were very unfit to see the light of day, being full
of oaths and obscene songs. After reading them, Lord Byron wrote in his
memoranda:----

"What an antithetical intelligence! Tenderness and harshness, refinement
and vulgarity, sentiment and sensuality; now soaring up into ether, and
then dragging along in mud. Mire and sublimity; all that is strangely
blended in this admixture of inspired dust. It may seem strange, but to
me it appears that a true voluptuary should never abandon his thought to
the coarseness of reality. It is only by exalting whatever terrestrial,
material, physical element there is in our pleasures, by veiling these
ideas, or forgetting them quite, or, at least, by never boldly naming
them to ourselves, only thus can we avoid disgust."

This is how Lord Byron understood voluptuousness. We might multiply such
quotations without end, taking them from every period of his life; all
would prove the same thing.

As to his poetry written at this time, especially the lyrical pieces
where he expresses his own sentiments, what can there be more chaste,
more ethereal? When a boy, he begins by consigning to the flames a whole
edition of his first poems, on account of a single one, which the Rev.
Dr. Beecher considered as expressing sentiments too warm for a young
man. In his famous satire, written at twenty,