Whatever virtue may be allowed to belong to personal courage, it is, most assuredly, they who are endowed by nature with the liveliest imaginations, and who have therefore most vividly and simultaneously before their eyes all the remote and possible consequences of danger, that are most deserving of whatever praise attends the exercise of that virtue.  A bravery of this kind, which springs more out of mind than temperament,—­or rather, perhaps, out of the conquest of the former over the latter,—­will naturally proportion its exertion to the importance of the occasion; and the same person who is seen to shrink with an almost feminine fear from ignoble and every-day perils, may be found foremost in the very jaws of danger where honour is to be either maintained or won.  Nor does this remark apply only to the imaginative class, of whom I am chiefly treating.  By the same calculating principle, it will be found that most men whose bravery is the result not of temperament but reflection, are regulated in their daring.  The wise De Wit, though negligent of his life on great occasions, was not ashamed, we are told, of dreading and avoiding whatever endangered it on others.

Of the apprehensiveness that attends quick imaginations, Lord Byron had, of course, a considerable share, and in all situations of ordinary peril gave way to it without reserve.  I have seldom seen any person, male or female, more timid in a carriage; and, in riding, his preparation against accidents showed the same nervous and imaginative fearfulness.  “His bridle,” says the late Lord B——­, who rode frequently with him at Genoa, “had, besides cavesson and martingale, various reins; and whenever he came near a place where his horse was likely to shy, he gathered up these said reins and fixed himself as if he was going at a five-barred gate.”  None surely but the most superficial or most prejudiced observers could ever seriously found upon such indications of nervousness any conclusion against the real courage of him who was subject to them.  The poet Ariosto, who was, it seems, a victim to the same fair-weather alarms,—­who, when on horseback, would alight at the least appearance of danger, and on the water was particularly timorous,—­could yet, in the action between the Pope’s vessels and the Duke of Ferrara’s, fight like a lion; and in the same manner the courage of Lord Byron, as all his companions in peril testify, was of that noblest kind which rises with the greatness of the occasion, and becomes but the more self-collected and resisting, the more imminent the danger.

In proposing to show that the distinctive properties of Lord Byron’s character, as well moral as literary, arose mainly from those two great sources, the unexampled versatility of his powers and feelings, and the facility with which he gave way to the impulses of both, it had been my intention to pursue the subject still further in detail, and to endeavour to trace throughout the various excellences and defects, both