e; but, however
it may be, the reflections of the biographer in this case are too
sensible and too true for us not to quote them with pleasure.

In concluding these remarks, which prove how high was the ideal type
that impelled Lord Byron to be unjust to himself, I will further
observe, that it was the exaggeration of his great characteristic
faculties which made him fail in some little virtue (such as prudence,
when it has its source _solely in our personal interest_). For it was
only to this degree, and from this point of view, that Lord Byron lacked
it. And it appears singular that his great mind should not have made him
see, in this very craving after self-examination, caused by his
inclination for truth; and in that extraordinary susceptibility of
conscience which lead to self-reproach for egotism, only because he
_felt pleasure in exercising beneficence and that it did not contain
enough sacrifice_; it is singular, I say, that this same spirit of
equity did not make him see how he shone in the only two faculties that
can have no alloy of egotism, and which were very evidently the most
_striking qualities of his character_. But he was, with regard to
himself, like the torch which, lighting up distant objects, leaves
those near it in obscurity. Lord Byron did not know himself; he had by
no means overcome that difficulty which the oracles of Greece pronounced
_the greatest_. Only he was sometimes conscious of it. In his memoranda,
written at Ravenna, in 1821, after having said that he does not think
the world judges him well, he adds:--

"I have seen myself compared, personally or poetically, in English,
French, German as (interpreted to me), Italian and Portuguese, within
these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretin, Timon of Athens,
Dante, Petrarch, an Alabaster Vase lighted up within, Satan, Shakspeare,
Bonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin the
clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the Phantasmagoria, to Henry the
Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to Young, R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to
Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a _petit maitre_, to Diogenes, to Childe
Harold, to Lara, to the Count in 'Beppo,' to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden,
to Burns, to Savage, to Chatterton, to 'oft have I heard of thee, my
Lord Byron,' in Shakspeare, to Churchill the poet, to Kean the actor, to
Alfieri, etc., etc. The object of so many contradictory comparisons must
probably be like something different from them