of his imagination, so, in return, his imagination supplied that dark colouring under which he so often disguised his true aspect from the world.  To such a perverse length, indeed, did he carry this fancy for self-defamation, that if (as sometimes, in his moments of gloom, he persuaded himself,) there was any tendency to derangement in his mental conformation[1], on this point alone could it be pronounced to have manifested itself.[2] In the early part of my acquaintance with him, when he most gave way to this humour,—­for it was observable afterwards, when the world joined in his own opinion of himself, he rather shrunk from the echo,—­I have known him more than once, as we have sat together after dinner, and he was, at the time, perhaps, a little under the influence of wine, to fall seriously into this sort of dark and self-accusing mood, and throw out hints of his past life with an air of gloom and mystery designed evidently to awaken curiosity and interest.  He was, however, too promptly alive to the least approaches of ridicule not to perceive, on these occasions, that the gravity of his hearer was only prevented from being disturbed by an effort of politeness, and he accordingly never again tried this romantic mystification upon me.  From what I have known, however, of his experiments upon more impressible listeners, I have little doubt that, to produce effect at the moment, there is hardly any crime so dark or desperate of which, in the excitement of thus acting upon the imaginations of others, he would not have hinted that he had been guilty; and it has sometimes occurred to me that the occult cause of his lady’s separation from him, round which herself and her legal adviser have thrown such formidable mystery, may have been nothing more, after all, than some imposture of this kind, some dimly hinted confession of undefined horrors, which, though intended by the relater but to mystify and surprise, the hearer so little understood him as to take in sober seriousness.

[Footnote 1:  We have seen how often, in his Journals and Letters, this suspicion of his own mental soundness is intimated.  A similar notion, with respect to himself, seems to have taken hold also of the strong mind of Johnson, who, like Byron, too, was disposed to attribute to an hereditary tinge that melancholy which, as he said, “made him mad all his life, at least not sober.”  This peculiar feature of Johnson’s mind has, in the late new edition of Boswell’s Life of him, given rise to some remarks, pregnant with all the editor’s well known acuteness, which, as bearing on a point so important in the history of the human intellect, will be found worthy of all attention.

In one of the many letters of Lord Byron to myself, which I have thought right to omit, I find him tracing this supposed disturbance of his own faculties to the marriage of Miss Chaworth;—­“a marriage,” he says, “for which she sacrificed the prospects of two very ancient families, and a heart which was hers from ten years old, and a head which has never been quite right since.”]