'looked the god of poetry, the god of the Vatican, when he conversed with the sons and daughters of

'man.'

His head was remarkably small*,—so much so as to be rather out of proportion with his face. The forehead, though a little too narrow, was high, and appeared more so from his having his hair (to preserve it, as he said) shaved over the temples; while the glossy, dark-brown curls, clustering over his head, gave the finish to its beauty. When to this is added, that his nose, though handsomely, was rather thickly shaped, that his teeth were white and regular, and his complexion colourless, as good an idea perhaps as it is in the power of mere words to convey may be conceived of his features.

In height he was, as he himself has informed us, five feet eight inches and a half, and to the length of his limbs he attributed his being such a good swimmer. His hands were very white, and—according to his own notion of the size of hands as indicating birth -aristocratically small. The lameness of his right foot †, though an obstacle to grace, but little impeded

**Several of us, one day,' says Colonel Napier, tried on his hat, and in a party of twelve or fourteen, who were at dinner, not one could put it on, so exceedingly small was his head. My servant, Thomas Wells, who had the smallest head in the 90th regiment, (so small that he could hardly get a cap to fit him,) was the only person who could put on Lord Byron's hat, and him it fitted exactly.'

+ In speaking of this lameness at the commencement of my work, I forbore, both from my own doubts on the subject and the great variance I found in the recollections of others, from stating in which of his feet this lameness existed. It will, indeed, with difficulty be believed what uncertainty I found upon this point, even among those most intimate with him. Mr. Hunt, in his book, states it to have been the left foot that was deformed, and this, though contrary to my own impression, and, as it appears also, to the fact, was the opinion I found also of others who had been much in the habit of living with him. On applying to his early friends at Southwell and to the shoemaker of that town who worked for him, so little prepared were they to answer with any certainty on the

the activity of his movements; and from this circumstance, as well as from the skill with which the foot was disguised by means of long trowsers, it would be difficult to conceive a defect of this kind less obtruding itself as a deformity; while the diffidence which a constant consciousness of the infirmity gave to his first approach and address made, in him, even lameness a source of interest.

In looking again into the Journal from which it was my intention to give extracts, the following unconnected opinions, or rather reveries, most of them on points connected with his religious opinions, are all that I feel tempted to select. To an assertion in the early part of this work, that at no time of his life was 'Lord Byron a confirmed unbeliever,' it has been objected, that many passages of his writings prove the direct contrary. This assumption, however, as well as the interpretation of most of the passages referred to in its support, proceed, as it appears to me, upon the mistake, not uncommon in conversation, of confounding together the meanings of the words unbeliever and sceptic, the former implying decision of opinion, and the latter only doubt. I have myself, I find, not always kept the significations of the two words distinct, and in one instance have so far fallen into the notion of these objectors as to speak of Byron in his youth as 'an unbelieving school-boy,' when the word doubting' would have more truly expressed my meaning. With this necessary explanation, I shall

subject, that it was only by recollecting that the lame foot was the off one in going up the street they at last came to the conclusion that his right limb was the one affected; and Mr. Jackson, his preceptor in pugilism, was, in like manner, obliged to call to mind whether his noble pupil was a right or left hand hitter before he could arrive at the same decision.

here repeat my assertion; or rather to clothe its substance in a different form-shall say that Lord Byron was, to the last, a sceptic, which, in itself, implies that he was, at no time, a confirmed unbeliever.

If I were to live over again, I do not know what I would change in my life, unless it were for-not to ' have lived at all *. All history, and experience, and the rest, teaches us that the good and evil are pretty equally balanced in this existence, and that what is 'most to be desired is an easy passage out of it. What can it give us but years? and those have little of good but their ending.

Of the immortality of the soul, it appears to me 'that there can be little doubt, if we attend for a moment to the action of mind: it is in perpetual activity. I used to doubt of it, but reflection has 'taught me better. It acts also so very independent ' of body—in dreams, for instance ;-incoherently and madly, I grant you, but still it is mind, and much more mind than when we are awake. Now that this 'should not act separately, as well as jointly, who can pronounce? The stoics, Epictetus and Marcus An'relius, call the present state "a soul which drags a 'carcass," a heavy chain, to be sure, but all chains

being material may be shaken off. How far our fu

ture life will be individual, or, rather, how far it will

at all resemble our present existence, is another ques'tion; but that the mind is eternal seems as probable

*Swift early adopted (says Sir Walter Scott) the custom of observing his birth-day, as a term, not of joy, but of sorrow, and of reading, when it annually recurred, the striking passage of Scripture, in which Job laments and execrates the day upon which it was said in his fa"ther's house "that a man-child was born."'-Life of Swift.

as that the body is not so. Of course, I here venture upon the question without recurring to revela'tion, which, however, is at least as rational a solution of it as any other. A material resurrection seems 'strange and even absurd, except for purposes of 'punishment; and all punishment which is to revenge ' rather than correct must be morally wrong; and when ‹ the world is at an end, what moral or warning purpose 'can eternal tortures answer? Human passions have probably disfigured the divine doctrines here;—but the whole thing is inscrutable.

.

'It is useless to tell me not to reason, but to believe. 'You might as well tell a man not to wake, but sleep. And then to bully with torments, and all that! I 'cannot help thinking that the menace of hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman 'humanity make villains.

'Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of good in his main-spring of mind. But, God help us all! it is at present a sad jar of atoms.

Matter is eternal, always changing, but repro'duced, and, as far as we can comprehend eternity, 'eternal; and why not mind? Why should not the 'mind act with and upon the universe, as portions of 'it act upon, and with, the congregated dust called 'mankind? See how one man acts upon himself and others, or upon multitudes! The same agency, in a

' higher and purer degree, may act upon the stars, &c. ad infinitum.

'I have often been inclined to materialism in philosophy, but could never bear its introduction into Christianity, which appears to me essentially founded upon the soul. For this reason, Priestley's Christian 'Materialism always struck me as deadly. Believe 'the resurrection of the body, if you will, but not with' out a soul. The deuce is in it, if after having had a 'soul (as surely the mind, or whatever you call it, is), ' in this world, we must part with it in the next, even for an immortal materiality! I own my partiality for spirit.

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day, 'as if there was some association between an internal approach to greater light and purity and the kindler ' of this dark lantern of our external existence.

The night is also a religious concern, and even more so when I viewed the moon and stars through 'Herschell's telescope, and saw that they were worlds.

'If, according to some speculations, you could prove 'the world many thousand years older than the Mo'saic chronology, or if you could get rid of Adam and Eve, and the apple, and serpent, still, what is to be put up in their stead? or how is the difficulty re'moved? Things must have had a beginning, and 'what matters it when or how?

'I sometimes think that man may be the relic of 'some higher material being wrecked in a former world, and degenerated in the hardship and struggle 'through chaos into conformity, or something like it,— as we see Laplanders, Esquimaux, &c. inferior in the