158 Byron' a Memoirs. QFKB. 



should conceive must tarnish, or rather extinguish, all human attrac- 

 tions in disgust and horror. Nor can we altogether agree in his lord- 

 ship's rapture about Medea, who, to the murder of her brother, added 

 that of her children. But he seems always to have made the idle mistake 

 that the more hideous the crime, the more the energy and loftiness of 

 character required for its commission. The fact is almost the direct 

 contrary the basest and most grovelling committing these horrors, in 

 ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. There are more cut-throats and 

 poisoners in the hovels of an Italian city at this hour, than could be 

 mustered among all the recorded heroes and heroines of the ancient or 

 modern world. A Roman fish-woman, disputing with her comrade 

 about sixpence- worth of sprats, has all this energy ; for she, without 

 ceremony, draws her knife, and plunges it into the bowels of the rival 

 dealer. A Lombard bravo, who stabs for half-a-crown, has the same 

 exact degree of energy ; he drives his stiletto to the hilt, and then 

 magnanimously cuts with it the loaf which he has purchased by his 

 labours. But the whole sentiment is monstrous, and founded on a 

 total misconception of the " great in human nature." 



We have now some observations of Mr. Moore's, touching the Guic- 

 cioli affair : 



" It was about this time (1819), when, as we perceive, like the first return 

 of reason after intoxication, a full consciousness of some of the evils of his 

 late libertine course of life, had broken in upon him, that an attachment dif- 

 fering altogether, both in duration and devotion, from any of those that since 

 the dream of his boyhood, had inspired him, gained an influence over his 

 mind, which lasted through his few remaining .years ; and undeniably wrong 

 and immoral, (even allowing for the Italian estimate of such frailties,) as was 

 the nature of the connexion to which this attachment led, we can hardly per- 

 haps, taking into account the far worse wrong from which it rescued and 

 preserved him, consider it otherwise than as an event fortunate both for his 

 reputation and his happiness." 



We are sorry to find those sentiments proceeding from the pen of Mr. 

 Moore. Tenderly as he touches the ground, he here virtually tells us, 

 that a base connection an open adultery was afortmiate event. On 

 this principle, the grossest vice might find its palliation. If Lord 

 Byron did not commit adultery, he would have committed something 

 worse is the plea for an intercourse against which the laws of God and 

 man equally protest; and which, instead of being less offensive to 

 morals, is actually the darkest and most pernicious shape which liber- 

 tinism can take. As to any palliative to be looked for in the profligacy 

 of Italian life, the ground breaks down at once. All the world knows 

 that Italy is a hot-bed of profligacy ; that every honorable tie of life is 

 there utterly derided ; and that adultery is the matrimonial habit of the 

 land. Italy, we also know, is incureable ; and while it submits to that 

 almost incredible corruption of all religion, which acquits men of the 

 basest crimes for money, Italy will always be a sink of abomination and 

 of slavery together. But we must not suffer such maxims to come so 

 recommended to our country. The whole romance of the Countess Guic- 

 cioli is, in every sense of the word, vicious; and ought to be called so. 

 In this career Lord Byron hastened on to his life's close. At last ennm 

 of the Countess, mingled with, as his biographer says, a painful con- 

 sciousness of his declining fame as a writer, urged him to try another 

 course. Greece attracted him, her unhappy cause had fixed the eyes of 



