that of the flute, when singing. In speaking, he was emphatic in rolling the letter r, perhaps out of a despair of being able to get rid of the national peculiarity. The structure of his versification, when I knew him, was more artificial than it was afterwards; and in his serious compositions it suited him better. He had hardly faith enough in the sentiments of which he treated to give way to his impulses in writing, except when they were festive and witty; and artificial thoughts demand a similar embodiment. Both patriotism and personal experience, however, occasionally inspired him with lyric pathos; and in his naturally musical perception of the right principles of versification, he contemplated the fine, easy-playing, muscular style of Dryden, with a sort of perilous pleasure. I remember his quoting with delight a couplet of Dryden's, which came with a particular grace from his lips:— "Let honour and preferment go for gold;

But glorious beauty isn't to be sold."

Beside the pleasure I took in Moore's society as a man of wit, I had a great esteem for him as a man of candour and independence. His letters were full of all that was pleasant in him. As I was a critic at that time, and in the habit of giving my opinion of his works in the Examiner, he would write me his opinion of the opinion, with a mixture of good humour, admission, and deprecation, so truly delightful, and a sincerity of criticism on my own writings so extraordinary for so courteous a man, though with abundance of balm and eulogy, that never any subtlety of compliment could surpass it; and with all my self-confidence I never ceased to think that the honour was on my side, and that I could only deserve such candour of intercourse by being as ingenuous as himself. This admiring regard for him he completed by his behaviour to an old patron of his, who, not thinking it politic to retain him openly by his side, proposed to facilitate his acceptance of a place under the Tories; an accommodation which Moore rejected as an indignity. I thought, afterwards, that a man of such a spirit should not have condescended to attack Rousseau and poor foolish Madame de Warens, out of a desire to right himself with polite life, and with the memory of some thoughtless productions of his own. Polite life was only too

happy to possess him in his graver days; and the thoughtless productions, however to be regretted on reflection, were reconcileable to reflection itself on the same grounds on which Nature herself and all her exuberance is to be reconciled. At least, without presuming to judge nature in the abstract, an ultra-sensitive and enjoying poet is himself a production of nature; and we may rest assured, that she will no more judge him with harshness ultimately, than she will condemn the excess of her own vines and fig-trees.

CHAPTER XIX.

LORD BYRON IN ITALY-SHELLEY-PISA.

As I am now about to re-enter into the history of my connection with Lord Byron, I will state in what spirit I mean to do it.

It is related of an Italian poet (Alamanni), that having in his younger days bitterly satirized the house of Austria, he found himself awkwardly situated in more advanced life, when, being in exile, and employed by Francis the First, the king sent him on an embassy to the court of Charles the Fifth. One of his sarcasms, in particular, had been very offensive. Alluding to the Austrian crest, the two-headed eagle, he had described the imperial house as a monstrous creature,

Which bore two beaks, the better to devour.
("Che per più divorar, due becchi porta.")

Charles had treasured this passage in his mind; and when the
ambassador, perhaps forgetting it altogether, or trusting to its
being forgotten, had terminated a fine oration, full of compli-
ments to the power which he had so angrily painted, the Em-
peror, without making any other observation, calmly said-
"Which bore two beaks, the better to devour."

"Sir," said Alamanni, not hesitating, or betraying any confusion (which shows that he was either prepared for the rebuke, or was a man of great presence of mind), “when I wrote that passage I spoke as a poet, to whom it is permitted to use fictions; but now I speak as an ambassador, who is

bound to utter truth. I spoke then as a young man; but I now speak as a man advanced in years. I spoke as one who was agitated by grief and passion at the wretched condition of my country; but now I am calm, and free from passion." Charles rose from his seat, and laying his hand on the shoulder of the ambassador, said, in the kindest manner, that the loss of his country ought not to grieve him, since he had found such a patron in Francis; and that to an honest man every place was his country.

I would apply this anecdote to some things which I have formerly said of Lord Byron. I do not mean that I ever wrote any fictions about him. I wrote nothing which I did not feel to be true, or think so. But I can say with Alamanni, that I was then a young man, and that I am now advanced in years. I can say, that I was agitated by grief and anger, and that I am now free from anger. I can say, that I was far more alive to other people's defects than to my own, and that I am now sufficiently sensible of my own to show to others the charity which I need myself. I can say, moreover, that apart from a little allowance for provocation, I do not think it right to exhibit what is amiss, or may be thought amiss, in the character of a fellow-creature, out of any feeling but unmistakeable sorrow, or the wish to lessen evils which society itself may have caused.

Lord Byron, with respect to the points on which he erred and suffered (for on all others, a man like himself, poet and wit, could not but give and receive pleasure), was the victim of a bad bringing up, of a series of false positions in society, of evils arising from the mistakes of society itself, of a personal disadvantage (which his feelings exaggerated), nay, of his very advantages of person, and of a face so handsome as to render him an object of admiration. Even the lameness, of which he had such a resentment, only softened the admiration with tenderness.

But he did not begin life under good influences. He had a mother, herself, in all probability, the victim of bad training, who would fling the dishes from table at his head, and tell him he would be a scoundrel like his father. His father, who was cousin to the previous lord, had been what is called

a man upon town, and was neither rich nor very respectable. The young lord, whose means had not yet recovered themselves, went to school, noble but poor, expecting to be in the ascendant with his title, yet kept down by the inconsistency of his condition. He left school to put on the cap with the gold tuft, which is worshipped at college:-he left college to fall into some of the worst hands on the town:-his first productions were contemptuously criticised, and his genius was thus provoked into satire:-his next were over-praised, which increased his self-love:-he married when his temper had been soured by difficulties, and his will and pleasure pampered by the sex-and he went companionless into a foreign country, where all this perplexity could repose without being taught better, and where the sense of a lost popularity could be drowned in licence.

Should we not wonder that he retained so much of the grand and beautiful in his writings?-that the indestructible tendency of the poetical to the good should have struggled to so much purpose through faults and inconsistencies ?— rather than quarrel with his would-be misanthropy and his effeminate wailings? The worst things which he did were to gird resentfully at women, and to condescend to some other pettiness of conduct which he persuaded himself were self-defences on his own part, and merited by his fellowcreatures. But he was never incapable of generosity: he was susceptible of the tenderest emotions; and though I doubt, from a certain proud and stormy look about the upper part of his face, whether his command of temper could ever have been quite relied on, yet I cannot help thinking, that had he been properly brought up, there would have been nobody capable of more lasting and loving attachments. The lower part of the face was a model of beauty.

I am sorry I ever wrote a syllable respecting Lord Byron which might have been spared. I have still to relate my connection with him, but it will be related in a different manner. Pride, it is said, will have a fall: and I must own, that on this subject I have experienced the truth of the saying. I had prided myself-I should pride myself now if I had not been thus rebuked-on not being one of those who talk against

others. I went counter to this feeling in a book; and to crown the absurdity of the contradiction, I was foolish enough to suppose that the very fact of my so doing would show that I had done it in no other instance! that having been thus public in the error, credit would be given me for never having been privately so! Such are the delusions inflicted on us by self-love. When the consequence was represented to me as characterized by my enemies, I felt, enemies though they were, as if I blushed from head to foot. It is true I had been goaded to the task by misrepresentations:-I had resisted every other species of temptation to do it:-and, after all, I said more in his excuse, and less to his disadvantage, than many of those who reproved me. But enough. I owed the acknowledgment to him and to myself; and I shall proceed on my course with a sigh for both, and I trust in the goodwill of the sincere.

To return, then, to my arrival at Leghorn.

In the harbour of Leghorn I found Mr. Trelawny, of the old Cornish family of that name, since known as the author of the Younger Brother. He was standing with his knighterrant aspect, dark, handsome, and mustachioed, in Lord Byron's boat, the Bolivar, of which he had taken charge for his lordship. In a day or two I went to see my noble acquaintance, who was in what the Italians call villeggiatura at Monte Nero; that is to say, enjoying a country house for the season. I there became witness to a singular adventure, which seemed to make me free of Italy and stilettos before I had well set foot in the country.

The day was very hot; the road to Monte Nero was very hot, through dusty suburbs; and when I got there, I found the hottest looking house I ever saw. It was salmon colour. Think of this, flaring over the country in a hot Italian sun!

But the greatest of all the heats was within. Upon seeing Lord Byron, I hardly knew him, he was grown so fat; and he was longer in recognising me, I had grown so thin. He took me into an inner room, and introduced me to Madame Guiccioli, then very young as well as handsome, who was in a state of great agitation. Her face was flushed, her eyes lit up, and her hair (which she wore hanging loose), streaming as if in