150 Byron's Memoirs. C^BB. 



had thrown off the black mantle under which he had made his retreat, 

 en grande costume, from the English newspapers, and was now follow- 

 ing pleasure in all ways and forms. He had begun his travels with 

 some of the sentimentality which does such wonders with the boarding- 

 schools ; and talked in his early letters the conversazione-tongue of 

 " I am a lover of nature, and an admirer of beauty. I have seen some 

 of the noblest views in the world. Yet in all this, the recollection of 

 bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, 

 which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here ; 

 and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche," 

 and so forth, " have one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, 

 nor enabled me to lose my more wretched identity in the majesty and 

 the power," &c. &c. 



All which was the very strain for a speech in " Manfred," and 

 was actually transferred there. But the whole story of Byron's 

 incurable agonies would have been laughed at by Byron himself, first 

 of the first, though they did very well to mystify the infinite race of 

 twaddledom that inhabiteth the western parts of London. The whole 

 might be inscribed with Burchell's expressive word " Fudge !" What 

 were the facts ? Here was a man in the vigour of life, with nothing on 

 earth to restrain him from following his whims from pole to pole, and 

 following them with all his might ; galloping through the finest regions 

 of Europe ; living where he liked ; running a round of operas, carni- 

 vals, and conversaziones ; indulging himself in all that bears the name 

 of pleasure, good and bad ; living among complying counts and tender 

 countesses ; and, with all this, enjoying an income of four or five thou- 

 sand pounds a year four times as much as three-fourths of his titled 

 associates possessed, and equivalent to fifteen or twenty thousand 

 pounds a year in England. All the exclamations that we hear on this 

 side of the water, about the " weight on his mind," &c. are nonsense ; 

 and as to his own sorrowings, we may be perfectly consoled, by knowing 

 that they never went farther than the fingers that held his pen. 



In fact, what kind of life would be the very one chosen by a young 

 rake of fashion and fortune but this ? and we have no doubt that the 

 most self-indulgent roue that ever decorated Bond-street, or waltzed at 

 Almack's, could go through the whole range, without shedding a tear 

 or heaving a sigh. A journey through Flanders, with all his comforts 

 ensured, even to a service of plate in his carriage ; a tour through the 

 Swiss Lakes ; a residence at Venice, in the house of a convenient scoun- 

 drel of a husband, who had a wife of twenty- two, with " oriental eyes ;" 

 the establishment of a promiscuous circle of the same species of persons, 

 with oriental eyes ; a houseful of those indescribable inmates at his beck, 

 with a general licensed system of expeditions on the same pursuit among 

 the Signoras of his noble friends ; the whole terminating in the tranquil 

 arrangement which secured a Countess Guiccioli for his exclusive share ; 

 all this, we suspect, would be exactly in the line of happiness which 

 the most unsentimental pursuer of the grossest objects of passion would 

 chalk out for his career, and think it quite unnecessary to call the world 

 to witness his agonies at the cruel necessity of doing everything that he 

 liked. The truth is, that Lord Byron ran the full career of his passions, 

 and must rest on his success in that career for the sympathy of mankind. 



He had evidently began to feel that the "sorrowing system" must have 

 its termination : 



