So various, indeed, and contradictory, were his attributes, both moral and intellectual, that he may be pronounced to have been not one, but many:  nor would it be any great exaggeration of the truth to say, that out of the mere partition of the properties of his single mind a plurality of characters, all different and all vigorous, might have been furnished.  It was this multiform aspect exhibited by him that led the world, during his short wondrous career, to compare him with that medley host of personages, almost all differing from each other, which he thus playfully enumerates in one of his Journals:—­

“I have been thinking over, the other day, on the various comparisons, good or evil, which I have seen published of myself in different journals, English and foreign.  This was suggested to me by accidentally turning over a foreign one lately,—­for I have made it a rule latterly never to search for any thing of the kind, but not to avoid the perusal, if presented by chance.

“To begin, then:  I have seen myself compared, personally or poetically, in English, French, German (as interpreted to me), Italian, and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretine, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, ’an alabaster vase, lighted up within,’ Satan, Shakspeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin, the Clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to young R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a petit-maitre, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold, to Lara, to the Count in Beppo, to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden, to Burns, to Savage, to Chatterton, to ’oft have I heard of thee, my Lord Biron,’ in Shakspeare, to Churchill the poet, to Kean the actor, to Alfieri, &c. &c. &c.

“The likeness to Alfieri was asserted very seriously by an Italian who had known him in his younger days.  It of course related merely to our apparent personal dispositions.  He did not assert it to me (for we were not then good friends), but in society.

“The object of so many contradictory comparisons must probably be like something different from them all; but what that is, is more than I know, or any body else.”

It would not be uninteresting, were there either space or time for such a task, to take a review of the names of note in the preceding list, and show in how many points, though differing so materially among themselves, it might be found that each presented a striking resemblance to Lord Byron.  We have seen, for instance, that wrongs and sufferings were, through life, the main sources of Byron’s inspiration.  Where the hoof of the critic struck, the fountain was first disclosed; and all the tramplings of the world afterwards but forced out the stream stronger and brighter.  The same obligations to misfortune, the same debt to the “oppressor’s wrong,” for having wrung out from bitter thoughts the pure essence of his genius, was due no less deeply by Dante!—­“quum illam sub amara cogitatione excitatam, occulti divinique ingenii vim exacuerit et inflammarit."[1]