defiance of his stronger.  His criticisms on all Byron wrote and felt seriously on religion are almost worthy of a conventicle.  His letters to others on Manfred, and Cain, and Don Juan, are the expression of sentiments which he had never the courage to state explicitly to the author.  On the other hand, Byron was attracted beyond reasonable measure by his gracefully deferential manners, paid too much regard to his opinions, and overestimated his genius.  For the subsequent destruction of the memoirs, urged by Mr. Hobhouse and Mrs. Leigh, he was not wholly responsible; though a braver man, having accepted the position of his lordship’s literary legatee, with the express understanding that he would seue to the fulfilment of the wishes of his dead friend, would have to the utmost resisted their total frustration.

Meanwhile, on landing in England, the poet had placed in the hands of Mr. Dallas the Hints from Horace, which he intended to have brought out by the publisher Cawthorne.  Of this performance—­an inferior edition, relieved by a few strong touches, of the Bards and Reviewers—­Dallas ventured to express his disapproval.  “Have you no other result of your travels?” he asked; and got for answer, “A few short pieces; and a lot of Spenserian stanzas; not worth troubling you with, but you are welcome to them.”  Dallas took the remark literally, saw they were a safe success, and assumed to himself the merit of the discovery, the risks, and the profits.  It is the converse of the story of Gabriel Harvey and the Faery Queene.  Tho first two cantos of Childe Harold bear no comparison with the legend of Una and the Red Cross Knight; but there was no mistake about their proof of power, their novelty, and adaptation to a public taste as yet unjaded by eloquent and imaginative descriptions of foreign scenery, manners, and climates.

The poem—­after being submitted to Gifford, in defiance of the protestations of the author, who feared that the reference might seem to seek the favour of the august Quarterly—­was accepted by Mr. Murray, and proceeded through the press, subject to change and additions, during the next five months.  The Hints from Horace, fortunately postponed and then suspended, appeared posthumously in 1831.  Byron remained at Newstead till the close of October, negotiating with creditors and lawyers, and engaged in a correspondence about his publications, in the course of which he deprecates any identification of himself and his hero, though he had at first called him Childe Byron.  “Instruct Mr. Murray,” he entreats, “not to allow his shopman to call the work ‘Child of Harrow’s Pilgrimage,’ as he has done to some of my astonished friends, who wrote to inquire after my sanity on the occasion, as well they might.”  At the end of the month we find him in London, again indulging in a voyage in “the ship of fools,” in which Moore claims to have accompanied him; but at the same time