gly heartless ridicule, all those natural and kindly
qualities by which they were redeemed."

And by way of contrast with the strange lightness of his letter to
Hoppner, as well as to do justice to the reality of his passion, Moore
then quotes the whole of those beautiful stanzas, called "The Po," which
Lord Byron wrote while crossing that river on his way from Venice to
Ravenna.[102]

We might multiply quotations, in order to prove that all those who knew
him have more or less remarked this phenomenon. But no one has well
determined its principal cause; or else it has been too much confounded
with the strange caprices he showed, especially in early youth; for
subsequently, says Moore, "_when he saw that the world gravely believed
the opinion he had given of himself, he refused any longer to echo it_."

There is certainly truth in the judgment passed by Moore and others. It
can not be denied that, when as a boy, he boasted of his dissipated life
at the University, the chief reason of it lay in the folly common to
that period of life, which impels human beings while yet children to
seek to appear like men by aping the vices of riper years. It can not be
denied, either, that the pleasure of mystifying suggested his answer to
Dallas; that an exaggerated horror of hypocrisy taught his pen a
thousand censures of himself beginning with his first satire; that a
sort of over-excitement and reaction of imagination gave him, at times,
the strange ambition of appearing to be one of those dark, proud heroes
he loved to paint for the sake of effect. Moreover, we must not forget
that witty turn of mind which his extraordinary perception of the
ridiculous, and his facility for seeing the two sides of things, often
made him to display at the expense of his better nature, by seeming to
mock his truest sentiments, as when he wrote to Hoppner: a psychological
phenomenon, of which the cause has been more particularly sought
elsewhere. Finally, we may also add that he might have believed he was
disarming envy and malice by speaking against himself; and that he was
to a certain extent escaping from the effects of those evil passions by
throwing them something whereon to feed. Who knows whether he also did
not--a little through goodness of heart, and greatly through the tactics
that make good politicians complain of the unpleasantnesses attached to
their greatness--ascribe to himself imaginary defects, so as to let some
compassion, under th