In picturing to oneself so awful an event as a shipwreck, its many horrors and perils are what alone offer themselves to ordinary fancies.  But the keen, versatile imagination of Byron could detect in it far other details, and, at the same moment with all that is fearful and appalling in such a scene, could bring together all that is most ludicrous and low.  That in this painful mixture he was but too true to human nature, the testimony of De Retz (himself an eye-witness of such an event) attests:—­“Vous ne pouvez vous imaginer (says the Cardinal) l’horreur d’une grande tempete;—­vous en pouvez imaginer aussi pen le ridicule.”  But, assuredly, a poet less wantoning in the variety of his power, and less proud of displaying it, would have paused ere he mixed up, thus mockingly, the degradation of humanity with its sufferings, and, content to probe us to the core with the miseries of our fellow-men, would have forborne to wring from us, the next moment, a bitter smile at their baseness.

To the moral sense so dangerous are the effects of this quality, that it would hardly, perhaps, be generalising too widely to assert that wheresoever great versatility of power exists, there will also be found a tendency to versatility of principle.  The poet Chatterton, in whose soul the seeds of all that is good and bad in genius so prematurely ripened, said, in the consciousness of this multiple faculty, that he “held that man in contempt who could not write on both sides of a question;” and it was by acting in accordance with this principle himself that he brought one of the few stains upon his name which a life so short afforded time to incur.  Mirabeau, too, when, in the legal warfare between his father and mother, he helped to draw up for each the pleadings against the other, was influenced less, no doubt, by the pleasure of mischief than by this pride of talent, and lost sight of the unnatural perfidy of the task in the adroitness with which he executed it.

The quality which I have here denominated versatility, as applied to power, Lord Byron has himself designated by the French word “mobility,” as applied to feeling and conduct; and, in one of the Cantos of Don Juan, has described happily some of its lighter features.  After telling us that his hero had begun to doubt, from the great predominance of this quality in her, “how much of Adeline was real,” he says,—­

  “So well she acted, all and every part,
    By turns,—­with that vivacious versatility,
  Which many people take for want of heart. 
    They err—­’tis merely what is called mobility,
  A thing of temperament and not of art,
    Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
  And false—­though true; for surely they’re sincerest,
  Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.”