of his poetry and his life, the operation of these two dominant attributes of his nature.  “No men,” says Cowper, in speaking of persons of a versatile turn of mind, “are better qualified for companions in such a world as this than men of such temperament.  Every scene of life has two sides, a dark and a bright one; and the mind that has an equal mixture of melancholy and vivacity is best of all qualified for the contemplation of either.”  It would not be difficult to show that to this readiness in reflecting all hues, whether of the shadows or the lights of our variegated existence, Lord Byron owed not only the great range of his influence as a poet, but those powers of fascination which he possessed as a man.  This susceptibility, indeed, of immediate impressions, which in him was so active, lent a charm, of all others the most attractive, to his social intercourse, by giving to those who were, at the moment, present, such ascendant influence, that they alone for the time occupied all his thoughts and feelings, and brought whatever was most agreeable in his nature into play.[1]

[Footnote 1:  In reference to his power of adapting himself to all sorts of society, and taking upon himself all varieties of character, I find a passage in one of my early letters to him (from Ireland) which, though it might be expressed, perhaps, in better taste, is worth citing for its truth:—­“Though I have not written, I have seldom ceased to think of you; for you are that sort of being whom every thing, high or low, brings into one’s mind.  Whether I am with the wise or the waggish, among poets or among pugilists, over the book or over the bottle, you are sure to connect yourself transcendently with all, and come ‘armed for every field’ into my memory.”]

So much did this extreme mobility,—­this readiness to be “strongly acted on by what was nearest,”—­abound in his disposition, that, even with the casual acquaintances of the hour, his heart was upon his lips[1], and it depended wholly upon themselves whether they might not become at once the depositories of every secret, if it might be so called, of his whole life.  That in this convergence of all the powers of pleasing towards present objects, those absent should be sometimes forgotten, or, what is worse, sacrificed to the reigning desire of the moment, is unluckily one of the alloys attendant upon persons of this temperament, which renders their fidelity, either as lovers or confidants, not a little precarious.  But of the charm which such a disposition diffuses through the manner there can be but little doubt,—­and least of all among those who have ever felt its influence in Lord Byron.  Neither are the instances in which he has been known to make imprudent disclosures of what had been said or written by others of the persons with whom he was conversing to be all set down to this rash overflow of the social hour.  In his own frankness of spirit, and hatred of all disguise, this practice, pregnant as it was with inconvenience,