It will hardly, by those who know anything of human nature, be denied that such misgivings and heart-sinkings as are here described may, under a similar depression of spirits, have found their way into the thoughts of some of the gallantest hearts that ever breathed; but then, untold and unremembered, even by the sufferer, they passed off with the passing infirmity that produced them, leaving neither to truth to record them as proofs of want of health, nor to calumny to fasten upon them a suspicion of want of bravery. The assertion of some one, that all men are by nature cowardly, would seem to be countenanced by the readiness with which most men believe others so. 'I 'have lived,' says the Prince de Ligne, to hear Vol'taire called a fool, and the great Frederick a coward.' The Duke of Marlborough in his own times, and Napoleon in ours, have found persons not only to assert but believe the same charge against them. After such glaring instances of the tendency of some minds to view greatness only through an inverting medium, it need little surprise us that Lord Byron's conduct in Greece should, on the same principle, have engendered a similar insinuation against him; nor should I have at all noticed the weak slander, but for the opportunity which it affords me of endeavouring to point out what appears to me the peculiar nature of the courage by which, on all occasions that called for it, he so strikingly distinguished himself.

Whatever virtue may be allowed to belong to personal courage, it is, most assuredly, they who are endowed by nature with the liveliest imaginations, and who have therefore most vividly and simultaneously before their eyes all the remote and possible consequences of danger, that are most deserving of what

ever praise attends the exercise of that virtue. A bravery of this kind, which springs more out of mind than temperament, or rather, perhaps, out of the conquest of the former over the latter,-will naturally proportion its exertion to the importance of the occasion; and the same person who is seen to shrink with an almost feminine fear from ignoble and every-day perils may be found foremost in the very jaws of danger where honour is to be either maintained or won. Nor does this remark apply only to the imaginative class, of whom I am chiefly treating. By the same calculating principle, it will be found that most men whose bravery is the result not of temperament but reflection, are regulated in their daring. The wise De Wit, though negligent of his life on great occasions, was not ashamed, we are told, of dreading and avoiding whatever endangered it on others.

Of the apprehensiveness that attends quick imaginations, Lord Byron had, of course, a considerable share, and in all situations of ordinary peril gave way to it without reserve. I have seldom seen any person, male or female, more timid in a carriage; and, in riding, his preparation against accidents showed the same nervous and imaginative fearfulness. 'His 'bridle,' says the late Lord B**, who rode frequently with him at Genoa, had, besides cavesson and martingale, various reins; and whenever he came near a 'place where his horse was likely to shy, he gathered up these said reins and fixed himself as if he was 'going at a five-barred gate.' None surely but the most superficial or most prejudiced observers could ever seriously found upon such indications of nervousness any conclusion against the real courage of him who was subject to them. The poet Ariosto, who was,

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it seems, a victim to the same fair-weather alarms,who, when on horseback, would alight at the least appearance of danger, and on the water was particularly timorous-could yet, in the action between the Pope's vessels and the Duke of Ferrara's, fight like a lion; and in the same manner the courage of Lord Byron, as all his companions in peril testify, was of that noblest kind which rises with the greatness of the occasion, and becomes but the more self-collected and resisting, the more imminent the danger.

In proposing to show that the distinctive properties of Lord Byron's character, as well moral as literary, arose mainly from those two great sources, the unexampled versatility of his powers and feelings, and the facility with which he gave way to the impulses of both, it had been my intention to pursue the subject still further in detail, and to endeavour to trace throughout the various excellencies and defects, both of his poetry and his life, the operation of these two dominant attributes of his nature. " No men,' says Cowper, in speaking of persons of a versatile turn of mind, are better qualified for companions in such a world as this than men of such temperament. Every 'scene of life has two sides, a dark and a bright one; ' and the mind that has an equal mixture of melancholy and vivacity is best of all qualified for the contemplation of either.' It would not be difficult to show that to this readiness in reflecting all hues, whether of the shadows or the lights of our variegated existence, Lord Byron owed not only the great range of his influence as a poet, but those powers of fascination which he possessed as a man. This susceptibility, indeed, of immediate impressions, which in him was so aétive, lent a charm, of all others the most attractive,

to his social intercourse, by giving to those who were, at the moment, present, such ascendant influence, that they alone for the time occupied all his thoughts and feelings, and brought whatever was most agreeable in his nature into play*.

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So much did this extreme mobility, this readiness to be strongly acted on by what was nearest,'abound in his disposition, that, even with the casual acquaintances of the hour, his heart was upon his lips †, and it depended wholly upon themselves whether they might not become at once the depositories of every secret, if it might be so called, of his whole life. That in this convergence of all the powers of pleasing towards present objects, those absent should be sometimes forgotten, or, what is worse, sacrificed to the reigning desire of the moment, is unluckily one of the alloys attendant upon persons of this temperament, which renders their fidelity, either as lovers or confidants, not a little precarious. But of the charm which such a disposition diffuses through the manner there can be but little doubt,-and least of all among

*In reference to his power of adapting himself to all sorts of society, and taking upon himself all varieties of character, I find a passage in one of my early letters to him (from Ireland) which, though it might be expressed, perhaps, in better taste, is worth citing for its truth:⚫ Though I have not written, I have seldom ceased to think of you; for “ you are that sort of being whom everything, high or low, brings into one's mind. Whether I am with the wise or the waggish, among poets or among pugilists, over the book or over the bottle, you are sure to connect yourself transcendently with all, and come armed for every "field" into my memory.'

* It is curious to observe how, in all times, and all countries, what is called the poetical temperament has, in the great possessors, and victims, of that gift, produced similar effects. In the following passage, the biographer of Tasso has, in painting that poet, described Byron also : There are some persons of a sensibility so powerful, that who، ever happens to be with them is, at that moment, to them the world : their hearts involuntarily open; they are prompted by a strong desire to please; and they thus make confidants of their sentiments people whom they in reality regard with indifference."

those who have ever felt its influence in Lord Byron. Neither are the instances in which he has been known to make imprudent disclosures of what had been said or written by others of the persons with whom he was conversing to be all set down to this rash overflow of the social hour. In his own frankness of spirit and hatred of all disguise, this practice, pregnant as it was with inconvenience, and sometimes danger, in a great degree originated. To confront the accused with the accuser was, in such cases, his delight,-not only as a revenge for having been made the medium of what men durst not say openly to each other, but as a gratification of that love of small mischief which he had retained from boyhood, and which the confusion that followed such exposures was always sure to amuse. This habit, too, being, as I have before remarked, well known to his friends, their sense of prudence, if not their fairness, was put fully on its guard, and he himself was spared the pain of hearing what he could not, without inflicting still worse, repeat.

A most apt illustration of this point of his character is to be found in an anecdote told of him by Parry, who, though himself the victim, had the sense and good temper to perceive the source to which Byron's conduct was to be traced. While the Turkish fleet was blockading Missolonghi, his lordship, one day, attended by Parry, proceeded in a small punt, rowed by a boy, to the mouth of the harbour, while in a large boat accompanying them were Prince Mavrocordato and his attendants. In this situation, an indignant feeling of contempt and impatience at the supineness of their Greek friends seized the engineer, and he proceeded to vent this feeling to Lord Byron in no very measured terms, pronouncing Prince Mavrocordato to