'An Englishman, a friend to liberty, having under'stood that the Neapolitans permit even foreigners to 'contribute to the good cause, is desirous that they 'should do him the honour of accepting a thousand louis, which he takes the liberty of offering. Having already, not long since, been an ocular witness of the 'despotism of the Barbarians in the States occupied. by them in Italy, he sees, with the enthusiasm 'natural to a cultivated man, the generous determina'tion of the Neapolitans to assert their well-won inde'pendence. As a member of the English House of 'Peers, he would be a traitor to the principles which 'placed the reigning family of England on the throne, if he were not grateful for the noble lesson so lately 'given both to people and to kings. The offer which 'he desires to make is small in itself, as must always 'be that presented from an individual to a nation; but he trusts that it will not be the last they will ' receive from his countrymen. His distance from the frontier, and the feeling of his personal incapacity to 'contribute efficaciously to the service of the nation, 'prevents him from proposing himself as worthy of 'the lowest commission, for which experience and ' talent might be requisite. But if, as a mere volun'teer, his presence were not a burden to whomsoever he might serve under, he would repair to whatever) place the Neapolitan Government might point out, there to obey the orders and participate in the' dangers of his commanding officer, without any other 'motive than that of sharing the destiny of a brave. nation, defending itself against the self-called Holy ́Alliance, which but combines the vice of hypocrisy 'with despotism*.'

*Un Inglese amico della libertà avendo sentito che i Napolitani per

It was during the agitation of this crisis, while surrounded by rumours and alarms, and expecting, every moment, to be summoned into the field, that Lord Byron commenced the Journal which I am now about to give; and which it is impossible to peruse, with the recollection of his former Diary of 1814 in our minds, without reflecting how wholly different, in all the circumstances connected with them, were the two periods at which these records of his passing thoughts were traced. The first he wrote at a time which may be considered, to use his own words, as 'the most poetical part of his whole life,'—not certainly, in what regarded the powers of his genius, to which every succeeding year added new force and range, but in all that may be said to constitute the poetry of character,-those fresh, unworldly feelings, of which, in spite of his early plunge into experience, he still retained the gloss, and that ennobling light of imagination, which, with all his professed scorn of mankind, still followed in the track of his affections,

mettono anche agli stranieri di contribuire alla buona causa, bramerebbe l'onore di vedere accettata la sua offerta di mille luigi, la quale egli ⚫ azzarda di fare. Già testimonio oculare non molto fa della tirannia dei • Barbari negli stati da loro occupati nell' Italia, egli vede con tutto l'entusiasmo di un uomo ben nato la generosa determinazione dei Napolitani per confermare la loro bene acquistata indipendenza. Membro della Camera dei Pari della nazione Inglese egli sarebbe un traditore 'ai principii che hanno posto sul trono la famiglia regnante d' Inghilterra se non riconoscesse la bella lezione di bel nuovo data ai popoli ed ai Re. L'offerta che egli brama di presentare è poca in se stessa, • come bisogna che sia sempre quella di un individuo ad una nazione, ma egli spera che non sarà l'ultima dalla parte dei suoi compatriotti. La 'sua lontananza dalle frontiere, e il sentimento della sua poca capacità 'personale di contribuire efficacimente a servire la nazione gl' impedisce di proporsi come degno della più piccola commissione che domanda dell' esperienza e del talento. Ma, se come semplice volontario la sua presenza non fosse un incomodo a quello che l'accetasse egli riparebbe a qualunque luogo indicato dal Governo Napolitano, per ubbidire agli ordini e participare ai pericoli del suo superiore, senza avere altri 'motivi che quello di dividere il destino di una brava nazione resistendo alla se dicente Santa Allianza la quale agguinge l' ippocrisia al despotismo.'

giving a lustre to every object on which they rested. There was, indeed, in his misanthropy, as in his sorrows, at that period, to the full as much of fancy as of reality; and even those gallantries and loves in which he at the same time entangled himself partook equally, as I have endeavoured to show, of the same imaginative character. Though brought early under the dominion of the senses, he had been also early rescued from this thraldom by, in the first place, the satiety such excesses never fail to produce, and, at no long interval after, by this series of half-fanciful attachments which, though in their moral consequences to society, perhaps, still more mischievous, had the varnish at least of refinement on the surface, and by the novelty and apparent difficulty that invested them served to keep alive that illusion of imagination from which such pursuits derive their sole redeeming charm.

With such a mixture, or rather predominance, of the ideal in his loves, his hates, and his sorrows, the state of his existence at that period, animated as it was, and kept buoyant, by such a flow of success, must be acknowledged, even with every deduction for the unpicturesque associations of a London life, to have been, in a high degree, poetical, and to have worn round it altogether a sort of halo of romance, which the events that followed were but too much calculated to dissipate. By his marriage, and its results, he was again brought back to some of those bitter realities of which his youth had had a foretaste. Pecuniary embarrassment,-that ordeal, of all others, the most trying to delicacy and high-mindednessnow beset him with all the indignities that usually follow in its train; and he was thus rudely schooled

VOL. III.

G

into the advantages of 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 selfhumbling 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 doubt, of this refractoriness may be accounted for by his absence from all those whose slightest word or look would have done more with him than whole volumes of correspondence; but by no cause less powerful and revulsive than the struggle in which he had been committed could a disposition naturally diffident as his was, and diffident even through all this excitement, have been driven into the assumption of a tone so universally defying, and so full, if not of pride in his own pre-eminent powers, of such a contempt for some of the ablest among his contemporaries, as almost implied it. It was, in fact, as has been more than once remarked in these pages, a similar stirring up of all the best and worst elements of his nature, to that which a like rebound against injustice had produced in his youth;-though with a difference, in point of force and grandeur, between the two explosions, almost as great as between the outbreaks of a firework and a volcano.

Another consequence of the spirit of defiance now