_possessing_ money, when he had hitherto thought but of the generous
pleasure of _dispensing_ it. No stronger proof, indeed, is wanting of
the effect of such difficulties in tempering down even the most
chivalrous pride, than the necessity to which he found himself reduced
in 1816, not only of departing from his resolution never to profit by
the sale of his works, but of accepting a sum of money, for copyright,
from his publisher, which he had for some time persisted in refusing
for himself, and, in the full sincerity of his generous heart, had
destined for others.

The injustice and malice to which he soon after became a victim had an
equally fatal effect in disenchanting the dream of his existence. Those
imaginary, or, at least, retrospective sorrows, in which he had once
loved to indulge, and whose tendency it was, through the medium of his
fancy, to soften and refine his heart, were now exchanged for a host of
actual, ignoble vexations, which it was even more humiliating than
painful to encounter. His misanthropy, instead of being, as heretofore,
a vague and abstract feeling, without any object to light upon, and
losing therefore its acrimony in diffusion, was now, by the hostility he
came in contact with, condensed into individual enmities, and narrowed
into personal resentments; and from the lofty, and, as it appeared to
himself, philosophical luxury of hating mankind in the gross, he was now
brought down to the self-humbling necessity of despising them in detail.

By all these influences, so fatal to enthusiasm of character, and
forming, most of them, indeed, a part of the ordinary process by which
hearts become chilled and hardened in the world, it was impossible but
that some material change must have been effected in a disposition at
once so susceptible and tenacious of impressions. By compelling him to
concentre himself in his own resources and energies, as the only stand
now left against the world's injustice, his enemies but succeeded in
giving to the principle of self-dependence within him a new force and
spring which, however it added to the vigour of his character, could not
fail, by bringing Self so much into action, to impair a little its
amiableness. Among the changes in his disposition, attributable mainly
to this source, may be mentioned that diminished deference to the
opinions and feelings of others which, after this compulsory rally of
all his powers of resistance, he exhibited. Some portion, no