and duty were but too likely to be sacrificed.  Let the advocate but display his eloquence and art, no matter what the cause;—­let the stamp of energy be but left behind, no matter with what seal. Could it have been expected that from such a career no mischief would ensue, or that among these cross-lights of imagination the moral vision could remain undisturbed? Is it to be at all wondered at that in the works of one thus gifted and carried away, we should find,—­wholly, too, without any prepense design of corrupting on his side,—­a false splendour given to Vice to make it look like Virtue, and Evil too often invested with a grandeur which belongs intrinsically but to Good?

Among the less serious ills flowing from this abuse of his great versatile powers,—­more especially as exhibited in his most characteristic work, Don Juan,—­it will be found that even the strength and impressiveness of his poetry is sometimes not a little injured by the capricious and desultory flights into which this pliancy of wing allures him.  It must be felt, indeed, by all readers of that work, and particularly by those who, being gifted with but a small portion of such ductility themselves, are unable to keep pace with his changes, that the suddenness with which he passes from one strain of sentiment to another,—­from the frolic to the sad, from the cynical to the tender,—­begets a distrust in the sincerity of one or both moods of mind which interferes with, if not chills, the sympathy that a more natural transition would inspire.  In general such a suspicion would do him injustice; as, among the singular combinations which his mind presented, that of uniting at once versatility and depth of feeling was not the least remarkable.  But, on the whole, favourable as was all this quickness and variety of association to the extension of the range and resources of his poetry, it may be questioned whether a more select concentration of his powers would not have afforded a still more grand and precious result.  Had the minds of Milton and Tasso been thus thrown open to the incursions of light, ludicrous fancies, who can doubt that those solemn sanctuaries of genius would have been as much injured as profaned by the intrusion?—­and it is at least a question whether, if Lord Byron had not been so actively versatile, so totally under the dominion of

  “A fancy, like the air, most free,
  And full of mutability,”

he would not have been less wonderful, perhaps, but more great.

Nor was it only in his poetical creations that this love and power of variety showed itself:—­one of the most pervading weaknesses of his life may be traced to the same fertile source.  The pride of personating every description of character, evil as well as good, influenced but too much, as we have seen, his ambition, and, not a little, his conduct; and as, in poetry, his own experience of the ill effects of passion was made to minister materials to the workings