Spinoza; and yet it is a gloomy creed; and I want a better; but there is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but I doubt everything.”  But his early attitude on matters of religion is best set forth in a letter to Gilford, of 1813, in which he says, “I am no bigot to infidelity, and did not expect that because I doubted the immortality of man I should be charged with denying the existence of a God.  It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in comparison of the mighty whole of which man is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be overrated.  This, and being early disgusted with a Calvinistic Scotch school, where I was cudgelled to church for the first ten years of my life, afflicted me with this malady; for, after all, it is, I believe, a disease of the mind, as much as other kinds of hypochondria.”

Hodgson was a type of friendly forbearance and loyal attachment, which had for their return a perfect open-heartedness in his correspondent.  To no one did the poet more freely abuse himself; to no one did he indulge in more reckless sallies of humour; to no one did he more readily betray his little conceits.  From him Byron sought and received advice, and he owed to him the prevention of what might have been a most foolish and disastrous encounter.  On the other hand, the clergyman was the recipient of one of the poet’s many single-hearted acts of munificence—­a gift of 1000_l_., to pay off debts to which he had been left heir.  In a letter to his uncle, the former gratefully alludes to this generosity:  “Oh, if you knew the exultation of heart, aye, and of head to, I feel at being free from those depressing embarrassments, you would, as I do, bless my dearest friend and brother, Byron.”  The whole transaction is a pleasing record of a benefit that was neither sooner nor later resented by the receiver.

Among other associates of the same group should be mentioned Henry Drury—­long Hodgson’s intimate friend, and ultimately his brother-in-law, to whom many of Byron’s first series of letters from abroad are addressed—­and Robert Charles Dallas, a name surrounded with various associations, who played a not insignificant part in Byron’s history, and, after his death, helped to swell the throng of his annotators.  This gentleman, a connexion by marriage, and author of some now forgotten novels, first made acquaintance with the poet in London early in 1808, when we have two letters from Byron, in answer to some compliment on his early volume, in which, though addressing his correspondent merely as ‘Sir,’ his flippancy and habit of boasting of excessive badness reach an absurd climax.