To those who have, from his childhood, traced him through these pages, it must be manifest, I think, that Lord Byron was not formed to be long-lived.  Whether from any hereditary defect in his organisation,—­as he himself, from the circumstance of both his parents having died young, concluded,—­or from those violent means he so early took to counteract the natural tendency of his habit, and reduce himself to thinness, he was, almost every year, as we have seen, subject to attacks of indisposition, by more than one of which his life was seriously endangered.  The capricious course which he at all times pursued respecting diet,—­his long fastings, his expedients for the allayment of hunger, his occasional excesses in the most unwholesome food, and, during the latter part of his residence in Italy, his indulgence in the use of spirituous beverages,—­all this could not be otherwise than hurtful and undermining to his health; while his constant recourse to medicine,—­daily, as it appears, and in large quantities,—­both evinced and, no doubt, increased the derangement of his digestion.  When to all this we add the wasteful wear of spirits and strength from the slow corrosion of sensibility, the warfare of the passions, and the workings of a mind that allowed itself no sabbath, it is not to be wondered at that the vital principle in him should so soon have burnt out, or that, at the age of thirty-three, he should have had—­as he himself drearily expresses it—­“an old feel.”  To feed the flame, the all-absorbing flame, of his genius, the whole powers of his nature, physical as well as moral, were sacrificed;—­to present that grand and costly conflagration to the world’s eyes, in which,

  “Glittering, like a palace set on fire,
  His glory, while it shone, but ruin’d him!"[1]

[Footnote 1:  Beaumont and Fletcher.]

It was on the very day when, as I have mentioned, the intelligence of his sister’s recovery reached him, that, having been for the last three or four days prevented from taking exercise by the rains, he resolved, though the weather still looked threatening, to venture out on horseback.  Three miles from Missolonghi Count Gamba and himself were overtaken by a heavy shower, and returned to the town walls wet through and in a state of violent perspiration.  It had been their usual practice to dismount at the walls and return to their house in a boat, but, on this day, Count Gamba, representing to Lord Byron how dangerous it would be, warm as he then was, to sit exposed so long to the rain in a boat, entreated of him to go back the whole way on horseback.  To this however, Lord Byron would not consent; but said, laughingly, “I should make a pretty soldier indeed, if I were to care for such a trifle.”  They accordingly dismounted and got into the boat as usual.

About two hours after his return home he was seized with a shuddering, and complained of fever and rheumatic pains.  “At eight that evening,” says Count Gamba, “I entered his room.  He was lying on a sofa restless and melancholy.  He said to me, ’I suffer a great deal of pain.  I do not care for death, but these agonies I cannot bear.’”