[Footnote 1:  In speaking of this lameness at the commencement of my work, I forbore, both from my own doubts on the subject and the great variance I found in the recollections of others, from stating in which of his feet this lameness existed.  It will, indeed, with difficulty be believed what uncertainty I found upon this point, even among those most intimate with him.  Mr. Hunt, in his book, states it to have been the left foot that was deformed, and this, though contrary to my own impression, and, as it appears also, to the fact, was the opinion I found also of others who had been much in the habit of living with him.  On applying to his early friends at Southwell and to the shoemaker of that town who worked for him, so little prepared were they to answer with any certainty on the subject, that it was only by recollecting that the lame foot “was the off one in going up the street” they at last came to the conclusion that his right limb was the one affected; and Mr. Jackson, his preceptor in pugilism, was, in like manner, obliged to call to mind whether his noble pupil was a right or left hand hitter before he could arrive at the same decision.]

In looking again into the Journal from which it was my intention to give extracts, the following unconnected opinions, or rather reveries, most of them on points connected with his religious opinions, are all that I feel tempted to select.  To an assertion in the early part of this work, that “at no time of his life was Lord Byron a confirmed unbeliever,” it has been objected, that many passages of his writings prove the direct contrary.  This assumption, however, as well as the interpretation of most of the passages referred to in its support, proceed, as it appears to me, upon the mistake, not uncommon in conversation, of confounding together the meanings of the words unbeliever and sceptic,—­the former implying decision of opinion, and the latter only doubt.  I have myself, I find, not always kept the significations of the two words distinct, and in one instance have so far fallen into the notion of these objectors as to speak of Byron in his youth as “an unbelieving school-boy,” when the word “doubting” would have more truly expressed my meaning.  With this necessary explanation, I shall here repeat my assertion; or rather—­to clothe its substance in a different form—­shall say that Lord Byron was, to the last, a sceptic, which, in itself, implies that he was, at no time, a confirmed unbeliever.

* * * * *

“If I were to live over again, I do not know what I would change in my life, unless it were for—­not to have lived at all.[1] All history and experience, and the rest, teaches us that the good and evil are pretty equally balanced in this existence, and that what is most to be desired is an easy passage out of it.  What can it give us but years? and those have little of good but their ending.

[Footnote 1:  Swift “early adopted,” says Sir Walter Scott, “the custom of observing his birth-day, as a term, not of joy, but of sorrow, and of reading, when it annually recurred, the striking passage of Scripture, in which Job laments and execrates the day upon which it was said in his father’s house ’that a man-child was born.’”—­Life of Swift.]