By the failure of the attempted mediation with Lady Byron, his last link with home was severed; while, notwithstanding the quiet and unobtrusive life which he had led at Geneva, there was as yet, he found, no cessation of the slanderous warfare against his character;—­the same busy and misrepresenting spirit which had tracked his every step at home having, with no less malicious watchfulness, dogged him into exile.  To this persuasion, for which he had but too much grounds, was added all that an imagination like his could lend to truth,—­all that he was left to interpret, in his own way, of the absent and the silent,—­till, at length, arming himself against fancied enemies and wrongs, and, with the condition (as it seemed to him) of an outlaw, assuming also the desperation, he resolved, as his countrymen would not do justice to the better parts of his nature, to have, at least, the perverse satisfaction of braving and shocking them with the worst.  It is to this feeling, I am convinced, far more than to any depraved taste for such a course of life, that the extravagances to which he now, for a short time, gave loose, are to be attributed.  The exciting effect, indeed, of this mode of existence while it lasted, both upon his spirits and his genius,—­so like what, as he himself tells us, was always produced in him by a state of contest and defiance,—­showed how much of this latter feeling must have been mixed with his excesses.  The altered character too, of his letters in this respect cannot fail, I think, to be remarked by the reader,—­there being, with an evident increase of intellectual vigour, a tone of violence and bravado breaking out in them continually, which marks the high pitch of re-action to which he had now wound up his temper.

In fact, so far from the powers of his intellect being at all weakened or dissipated by these irregularities, he was, perhaps, at no time of his life, so actively in the full possession of all its energies; and his friend Shelley, who went to Venice, at this period, to see him[23], used to say, that all he observed of the workings of Byron’s mind, during his visit, gave him a far higher idea of its powers than he had ever before entertained.  It was, indeed, then that Shelley sketched out, and chiefly wrote, his poem of “Julian and Maddalo,” in the latter of which personages he has so picturesquely shadowed forth his noble friend[24]; and the allusions to “the Swan of Albion,” in his “Lines written among the Euganean Hills,” were also, I understand, the result of the same access of admiration and enthusiasm.

In speaking of the Venetian women, in one of the preceding letters, Lord Byron, it will be recollected, remarks, that the beauty for which they were once so celebrated is no longer now to be found among the “Dame,” or higher orders, but all under the “fazzioli,” or kerchiefs, of the lower.  It was, unluckily, among these latter specimens of the “bel sangue” of Venice that he now, by a suddenness of descent in the scale of refinement, for which nothing but the present wayward state of his mind can account, chose to select the companions of his disengaged hours;—­and an additional proof that, in this short, daring career of libertinism, he was but desperately seeking relief for a wronged and mortified spirit, and