One thing we notice in most of the familiar letters of Byron,—­that he makes frequent use of a vulgar expletive.  But when I remember that the Prince of Wales, the Lord Chancellor, the judges, the lawyers, the ministers of the Crown, and many other distinguished people were accustomed to use the same expression, I would fain hope that it was not meant for profanity, but was a sort of fashionable slang intended only to be emphatic.  Fifty years have seen a great improvement in the use of language, and the vulgarism which then appeared to be of slight importance is now regarded, almost universally with gentlemen, to be at least in very bad taste.  How far Byron transgressed beyond the frequent use of this expletive, does not appear either in his letters or in his biography; yet from his irreverent nature, and the society with which he was associated, it is more than probable that in him profanity was added to the other vices of his times.

Especially did he indulge in drinking to excess in all convivial gatherings.  It was seldom that gentlemen sat down to a banquet without each despatching two or three bottles of wine in the course of an evening.  No wonder that gout was the pervading disease among county squires, and even among authors and statesman.  Morality was not one of the features of English society one hundred years ago, except as it consisted in a scrupulous regard for domesticity, truth, and honor, and abhorrence of meanness and hypocrisy.

It would be difficult to point out any defects and excesses of which Byron was guilty at this period beyond what were common to other fashionable young men of rank and leisure, except a spirit of religious scepticism and impiety, and a wanton and inexcusable recklessness in regard to women, which made him a slave to his passions.  The first alienated him, so far as he was known, from the higher respectable classes, who generally were punctilious in the outward observances of religion; and the second made him abhorred by the virtuous middle class, who never condoned his transgressions in this respect.  But at this time his character was not generally known.  It was not until he was seated on the pinnacle of fame that public curiosity penetrated the scandals of his private life.  He was known only as a young nobleman in quest of the excitements of foreign travel, and his letters of introduction procured him all the society he craved.  Not yet had he expressed bitterness and wrath against the country which gave him birth; he simply found England dull, and craved adventures in foreign lands as unlike England as he could find.  The East stimulated his imagination, and revived his classical associations.  He saw the Orient only as an enthusiastic poet would see it, and as Lamartine saw Jerusalem.  But Byron was more curious about the pagan cities of antiquity than concerning the places consecrated by the sufferings of our Lord.  He cared more to swim across the Hellespont with Leander than to wander over the sacred hills of Judaea; to idealize a beautiful peasant girl among the ruins of Greece, than converse with the monks of Palestine in their gloomy retreats.