1831.] Byron's Memoirs. 147 



crimes were the result of the " persecution he met with on the thresh- 

 hold of his boyish enterprise to teach and reform the world." For 

 which purpose of reform, " he with a courage, admirable if it had been 

 wisely directed, made war upon authority and experience." Such is 

 the softened tone of the fashionable circles. But the truth is perfectly 

 well known, and it is that Shelley was any thing but an abstract 

 philosopher ; that he was as practical a person, in the matter of his own 

 pleasures, and in his scorn of the obligations of society, as any gen- 

 tleman who never wrote verses, nor talked sentimental foolery on lakes 

 and glaciers. In short, he was a Lord Byron rase his lordship, in all 

 his loves and libels, but on a lower scale. Shelley's true history ought 

 to be written for the benefit of all young gentlemen who profess genius, 

 and think that the habit of writing verses is to be a full and fair quit- 

 tance of every kind of moral obligation. The history of his first wife 

 that unhappy woman whom he abandoned, and whose suicide made so 

 melancholy an impression on the public ; the nature of his subsequent 

 life ; his open atheism ; the palpable and atrocious blasphemy of his 

 writings ; his favourite tenets (which even the biographer is forced to 

 acknowledge) of the community of property and the community of wives, 

 are sufficient to stamp his character. The vulgar bravado of writing 

 in the Album at Mont Blanc, " Bysshe Shelley, Atheist !" shews that a 

 miserable vanity prompted him to outrage society, and that crime lost 

 half its charms to him unless he called the world to wonder at him as a 

 criminal. But he perished. His coxcomb impiety met a sudden fate ; 

 and, heathen as he lived and died, his noble friend gave him a heathen 

 burial burned him and, as Mr. Gait's narrative tells us, got drunk 

 over his bones ! 



But Lord Byron, through his whole career, had an extraordinary 

 fondness for associates whom every one else would have rejected. Ano- 

 ther of his intimates was a wretched being, whose fate by his own hand 

 a few years ago was the natural consequence of his principles. This was 

 Dr. Polidori, who, after scribbling, gaming, and trying the world in all 

 kinds of ways, was reduced to extremity in London, and, in the true 

 philosophic and march-of-intellect style, either cut his throat or poisoned 

 himself. Mr. Hobhouse must be excepted from the black list of those 

 travelling friends. He has striven for fame by none of the sublimities 

 of those personages who are too refined to follow the common decencies 

 of life. But he seems to have kept aloof from the ' f midnight conver- 

 sations" and other deeper mysteries of his lordship's enjoyments ; and, 

 in fact, to have at no time sanctioned the orgies of the set. Yet it is 

 from him that Lord Byron's personal character has found the most vigi- 

 lant and manly defence ; and while some of those bosom friends and 

 compotators have been trying to make money of the unfortunate peer's 

 vices, and publishing all that could sink him in the public estimation, 

 he has kept guard over his remains, and by vigorously punishing some 

 of his assailants, has deterred the general mob whom Lord Byron admit- 

 ted to his intercourse, from heaping additional disgrace on his memory. 



His lordship at last got rid of Shelley and his prosing, and began a 

 new course of intrigue. Of this disgraceful affair, which was no other 

 than a regular business of adultery, he makes Mr. Moore the confidant ; 

 an insult, at which we must presume the biographer was indignant > 

 though, unfortunately, we can discover nothing of his indignation in 

 these pages. 



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