1831.] Byron's Memoirs. 153 



thick of the world, ami placed upon the pinnacle of success, with no external 



means to support him in his elevation. Did Fox pay his debts? or 



did Sheridan take a subscription ? Was the Duke of Norfolk's drunkenness 

 more excusable than his ? Were his intrigues more notorious than those of 

 all his contemporaries ? And is his memory to be blasted, and theirs re- 

 spected? Don't let yourself be led away by clamour, but compare him with 

 the coalitioner Fox and the pensioner Burke, as a man of principle, and with 

 ten hundred thousand others in personal views, and with none in talent, for he 

 beat them all out and out. Without means, without connection, without 

 character, (which might be false at first, and afterwards make him mad from 

 desperation,) he beat them all, in all he ever attempted. But alas, poor human 

 nature !" 



The biographer proceeds to give a glimpse of the kind of life which 

 his lordship led at this period in Venice. He had dismissed the linen- 

 draper's wife for such was the rank of the " Merchant of Venice" 

 and now ranged the realm on a larger scale. " Highly censurable, in 

 point of morality and decorum, as was his course of life while under the 



roof of Madame , it was (with pain I am forced to confess) 



venial in comparison with the strange, headlong career of licence, to 

 which, when weaned from that connection, he so unrestrainedly, and, it 

 may be added, defyingly abandoned himself." 



For this license, the same excuse is found which served to palliate all 

 his former exhibitions. (e He had found no cessation of the slanderous 

 warfare; against his character ; the same busy and misrepresenting spirit 

 which had tracked his every step at home, having, with no less malicious 

 watchfulness, dogged him into exile." And, therefore, and for this 

 reason, of a wounded spirit, his lordship (" assuming the desperation 

 of an outlaw, with the condition, as it seemed to him), resolved, as 

 his countrymen would not do justice to the better parts of his nature, to 

 have at least the perverse satisfaction of braving and shocking them 

 with the worst." 



Now, against this language we altogether protest, as lending an easy 

 excuse to the most profound profligacy, in whatever rank it may occur. 

 The libertine who sinks into the most debasing vileiiesses, has nothing 

 more to say than that he was driven to them by the world's bad opinion 

 of him, or by his own superior delicacy of feeling, and starts forth a hero ; 

 he unites all the gratifications of the libertine with all the honours of the 

 anchorite, makes his reputation by the loss of character, and is the more 

 virtuous the more he replenishes his seraglio. We greatly fear, for the 

 prudery of gentlemen of a certain age, that a Venetian life will not be 

 always received by the world as an evidence of immaculate virtue j nor 

 that the thick understandings of the British empire will allow any man 

 to have at once all the advantages, such as they may be deemed, of a life 

 of unbridled licence, with all the feelings due to the sufferer under an 

 injured sensibility. In common English, if a man gets drunk, he does 

 it for love of wine ; if he games, it is for love of the die ; if he follows 

 other excesses, it is for love of the vice in question. And of Lord Byron 

 and his Marianna, and his half hundred Mariannas, the world will come 

 to the same conclusion. It can comprehend nothing of this Mulatto 

 mixture of good and evil this vicious virtue, and sublime debasement 

 this plunging into the most vulgar profligacy, for the sake of indulging 

 a too exquisite sense of refinement and this utter and impudent defiance 

 of public decency, from a superabundant value for public opinion. 



The story of Margarita Cogni, one of the tribe whom Lord Byron 

 M.M. Nent Series. VOL. XI. No. 62. X 



