Of the utter powerlessness of retention with which he promulgated his every thought and feeling,—­more especially if at all connected with the subject of self,—­without allowing even a pause for the almost instinctive consideration whether by such disclosures he might not be conveying a calumnious impression of himself, a stronger instance could hardly be given than is to be found in a conversation held by him with Mr. Trelawney, as reported by this latter gentleman, when they were on their way together to Greece.  After some remarks on the state of his own health[1], mental and bodily, he said, “I don’t know how it is, but I am so cowardly at times, that if, this morning, you had come down and horsewhipped me, I should have submitted without opposition.  Why is this?  If one of these fits come over me when we are in Greece, what shall I do?”—­“I told him (continues Mr. Trelawney) that it was the excessive debility of his nerves.  He said, ’Yes, and of my head, too.  I was very heroic when I left Genoa, but, like Acres, I feel my courage oozing out at my palms.’”

[Footnote 1:  “He often mentioned,” says Mr. Trelawney, “that he thought he should not live many years, and said that he would die in Greece.”  This he told me at Cephalonia.  He always seemed unmoved on these occasions, perfectly indifferent as to when he died, only saying that he could not bear pain.  On our voyage we had been reading with great attention the life and letters of Swift, edited by Scott, and we almost daily, or rather nightly, talked them over; and he more than once expressed his horror of existing in that state, and expressed some fears that it would be his fate.]

It will hardly, by those who know any thing of human nature, be denied that such misgivings and heart-sinkings as are here described may, under a similar depression of spirits, have found their way into the thoughts of some of the gallantest hearts that ever breathed;—­but then, untold and unremembered, even by the sufferer himself, they passed off with the passing infirmity that produced them, leaving neither to truth to record them as proofs of want of health, nor to calumny to fasten upon them a suspicion of want of bravery.  The assertion of some one that all men are by nature cowardly would seem to be countenanced by the readiness with which most men believe others so.  “I have lived,” says the Prince de Ligne, “to hear Voltaire called a fool, and the great Frederick a coward.”  The Duke of Marlborough in his own times, and Napoleon in ours, have found persons not only to assert but believe the same charge against them.  After such glaring instances of the tendency of some minds to view greatness only through an inverting medium, it need little surprise us that Lord Byron’s conduct in Greece should, on the same principle, have engendered a similar insinuation against him; nor should I have at all noticed the weak slander, but for the opportunity which it affords me of endeavouring to point out what appears to me the peculiar nature of the courage by which, on all occasions that called for it, he so strikingly distinguished himself.