precious Regent.  What a creature!  Good men and bad men unite in saying that he was absolutely without a virtue; the shrewd, calculating Greville described him in words that burn; the great Duke, his chief subject, uses language of dry scorn—­“The king could only act the part of a gentleman for ten minutes at a time”; and we find that the commonest satellites of the Court despised the wicked fribble who wore the crown of England.  Faithless to women, faithless to men, a coward, a liar, a mean and grovelling cheat, George IV. nevertheless clung to a belief in his own virtues; and, if we study the account of his farcical progress through Scotland, we find that he imagined himself to be a useful and genuinely kingly personage.  No man, except, perhaps, Philippe Egalite, was ever so contemned and hated; and until his death he imagined himself to be a good man.  In all that wild set who disgraced England and disgraced human nature in those gay days of Byron’s youth, I can discover only one thoroughly manly and estimable individual, and that was Gentleman Jackson, the boxer; yet, with such a marvellously wide range of villainy to study, Byron never seems to have observed one ethical fact of the deepest importance—­a villain never knows that he is villainous; if he did, he would cease to be a villain.

Perhaps Byron’s own peculiar disposition—­his constitution—­prevented him from understanding the undoubted truth which I have stated.  Like all other men, he possessed a dual nature; there was bad in him and good, and his force was such that the bad was very bad indeed, and the good was as powerful in its way as the evil.  During the brief time that Byron employed in behaving as a bad man, his conduct reached almost epic heights—­or depths—­of misdoing; but he never in his heart seemed to recognise the fact that he had been a bad man.  At any rate, he was wrong; and the commonest knowledge of our wild world suffices to show any reasoning man the gravity of the error propounded in my quotation.  As we study the history of the frivolous race of men, it sometimes seems hard to disbelieve the theory of Descartes.  The great Frenchman held that man and other animals are automata; and, were it not that such a theory strikes at the root of morals, we might almost be tempted to accept it in moments of weakness, when the riddle of the unintelligible earth weighs heavily on the tired spirit.  I find that every prominent scoundrel known to us pursued his work of sin with an absolute unconsciousness of all moral law until pain or death drew near; then the scoundrel cringed like a cur under the scourges of remorse.  Thackeray, in a fit of spasmodic courage, painted the archetypal scoundrel once and for all in “Barry Lyndon,” and he practically said the last word on the subject; for no grave analysis, no reasoning, can ever improve on that immortal and most moving picture of a wicked man.  Observe the masterpiece.  Lyndon goes on with his narrative from one horror to another;