still proceeding from the local press at Newark, were given to the world.  In June we find the poet again writing from his college rooms, dwelling with boyish detail on his growth in height and reduction in girth, his late hours and heavy potations, his comrades, and the prospects of his book.  From July to September he dates from London, excited by the praises of some now obscure magazine, and planning a journey to the Hebrides.  In October he is again settled at Cambridge, and in a letter to Miss Pigot, makes a humorous reference to one of his fantastic freaks:  “I have got a new friend, the finest in the world—­a tame bear.  When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was, ‘He should sit for a fellowship.’  This answer delighted them not.”  The greater part of the spring and summer of 1808 was spent at Dorant’s Hotel, Albemarle Street.  Left to himself, he seems during this period for the first time to have freely indulged in dissipations, which are in most lives more or less carefully concealed.  But Byron, with almost unparalleled folly, was perpetually taking the public into his confidence, and all his “sins of blood,” with the strange additions of an imaginative effrontery, have been thrust before us in a manner in which Rochester or Rousseau might have thought indelicate.  Nature and circumstances conspired the result.  With passions which he is fond of comparing to the fires of Vesuvius and Hecla, he was, on his entrance into a social life which his rank helped to surround with temptations, unconscious of any sufficient motive for resisting them; he had no one to restrain him from the whim of the moment, or with sufficient authority to give him effective advice.  A temperament of general despondency, relieved by reckless outbursts of animal spirits, is the least favourable to habitual self-control.  The melancholy of Byron was not of the pensive and innocent kind attributed to Cowley, rather that of the, [Greek:  melancholikoi] of whom Aristotle asserts, with profound psychological or physiological intuition, that they are [Greek:  aei en sphodra orexei].  The absurdity of Moore’s frequent declaration, that all great poets are inly wrapt in perpetual gloom, is only to be excused by the modesty which, in the saying so obviously excludes himself from the list.  But it is true that anomalous energies are sources of incessant irritation to their possessor, until they have found their proper vent in the free exercise of his highest faculties.  Byron had not yet done, this, when he was rushing about between London, Brighton, Cambridge, and Newstead—­shooting, gambling, swimming, alternately drinking deep and trying to starve himself into elegance, green-room hunting, travelling with disguised companions,[1] patronizing D’Egville the dancing-master, Grimaldi the clown, and taking lessons from Mr. Jackson, the distinguished professor of pugilism, to whom he afterwards affectionately refers as his “old friend and