184 Moore s Notices of Lord Byron. FEB. 



threatens to come, is not within human, sufferings. A calamity of the 

 same organs made Rousseau mad and a misanthropist through life, and, 

 finally, drove him to suicide. It was, probably, the chief source of 

 Swift's eternal spleen ; and a large portion of Gibbon's restless scorn of 

 all that is best and noblest in our nature, may have arisen from a similar 

 malady. Byron had the additional misfortune of a club-foot, which, 

 from its being the unlucky appendage to a man, vain, even to foppery, 

 of his personal appearance, was a source of constant vexation. Other 

 vexations existed, in the character of his parent, which, whether from 

 a slur thrown on his birth, or the natural reluctance of respectable 

 people to have any thing to do with so extraordinary and violent a per- 

 son as Mrs. Byron, (his father having died some years before) left the 

 young heir of a broken patrimony strangely at a loss on his entrance 

 into the world. 



Dallas, a very remote relation, as the biographer emphatically remarks, 

 seems to have been for some time the only substitute for the " troops of 

 friends" that generally make a young lord buoyant on the St. James's 

 tide. If Byron had been intended for a politician, or a dandy, or a 

 hanger-on of the clubs, or a well bred fortune hunter, this desertion 

 would have undone him ; he would have taken to the bottle, from that to 

 the dice, and from the dice to that cure of all sorrows, payment of all 

 debts, and relief from all ennui, which is to be found in prussic acid or 

 the pistol. 



But he was intended by nature for a poet. And every step of his 

 career was by a strong necessity ordered for his future eminence. His 

 foot, his disease, the desertion of all other society, and the society of Mr. 

 Dallas, were all powerful provocatives to spleen. The insolence and 

 flagellation inflicted on him by the Edinburgh Reviewers, first taught 

 him that he could be a satirist. The selfishness of the world first stimu- 

 lated him to cut and scarify it in all directions ; and the bitterness and 

 insanity of his virago mother first drove him abroad, and gave the world 

 Childe Harold." 



Our theory is unquestionable, that the materiel of poetry exists in a 

 thousand minds for one that has the circumstances to bring it out; as 

 every pebble contains fire, and hit it but hard enough, gives it out too ; 

 but bury the flint in a slough, or polish it into the ornament of a fair 

 lady's necklace, and it is equally beyond the chance of giving out that 

 spark, which if luckily placed, may blow up a house, a ship, or a city. If 

 Byron had found his entre into the world preceded by the fair and the 

 fond strewing his path with rose-buds, as is the custom with young lords 

 in general ; if noble fathers had overwhelmed him with cards for their 

 banquets, and noble mothers speculated on him for their daughters, and 

 noble misses " fondly marked him for their own," what could he have 

 been but what all the tribe of heirs are ? Where would have been his 

 solitary hours of fierce musing, his'brilliant visions of vengeance, his Don 

 Juan determinations to slay and betray, and sting and startle, and lay 

 society in flame, that he might have the delight of seeing it roast while 

 he danced round the pile ? 



With seventy thousands a year, he would have been like Bob Ward, a 

 diner out and epigram maker ; with Alvanly's reception among the old 

 women, he would have been like him, a lover of comfits and writer of 

 epilogues ; with young Castlereagh's or Clanricard's prospects, he would 

 have been petted and pulled about by the lovely marriageable and por- 



