AND JOURNALS OF LORD BYRON: WITH Notices of his Life, BY THOMAS MOORE. IN FOUR VOLUMES. VOL. III. PARIS: PUBLISHED BY A. AND W. GALIGNANI, AT THE ENGLISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, AND SPANISH LIBRARY, 1834. NOTICES OF THE LIFE OF LORD BYRON. THE circumstances under which Lord Byron now took leave of England were such as, in the case of any ordinary person, could not be considered otherwise than disastrous and humiliating. He had, in the course of one short year, gone through every variety of domestic misery ;-had seen his hearth eight or nine times profaned by the visitations of the law, and been only saved from a prison by the privileges of his rank. He had alienated, as far as they had ever been his, the affections of his wife; and now, rejected by her, and condemned by the world, was betaking himself to an exile which had not even the dignity of appearing voluntary, as the excommunicating voice of society seemed to leave him no other resource. Had he been of that class of unfeeling and self-satisfied natures from whose hard surface the reproaches of others fall pointless, he might have found in insensibl a sure refuge against reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that kept him so awake to the applauses ef mankind rendered him, in a still more intense degree, alive to their cenEven the strange, perverse pleasure which he sure. VOL. III. I |