it is necessary to state these preliminaries to prevent the recurrence of any similar mistake.  I shall see you in time, and will carry you to the limner.  It will be a tax on your patience for a week, but pray excuse it, as it is possible the resemblance may be the sole trace I shall be able to preserve of our past friendship and acquaintance.  Just now it seems foolish enough, but in a few years, when some of us are dead, and others are separated by inevitable circumstances, it will be a kind of satisfaction to retain in these images of the living the idea of our former selves, and to contemplate, in the resemblances of the dead, all that remains of judgment, feeling, and a host of passions.  But all this will be dull enough for you, and so good night, and to end my chapter, or rather my homily, believe me, my dear H.,

yours most affectionately.”

In this romantic design of collecting together the portraits of his school friends, we see the natural working of an ardent and disappointed heart, which, as the future began to darken upon it, clung with fondness to the recollections of the past; and, in despair of finding new and true friends, saw no happiness but in preserving all it could of the old.  But even here, his sensibility had to encounter one of those freezing checks, to which feelings, so much above the ordinary temperature of the world, are but too constantly exposed;—­it being from one of the very friends thus fondly valued by him, that he experienced, on leaving England, that mark of neglect of which he so indignantly complains in a note on the second Canto of Childe Harold,—­contrasting with this conduct the fidelity and devotedness he had just found in his Turkish servant, Dervish.  Mr. Dallas, who witnessed the immediate effect of this slight upon him, thus describes his emotion:—­

“I found him bursting with indignation.  ‘Will you believe it?’ said he, ’I have just met ——­, and asked him to come and sit an hour with me:  he excused himself; and what do you think was his excuse?  He was engaged with his mother and some ladies to go shopping!  And he knows I set out to-morrow, to be absent for years, perhaps never to return!—­Friendship!  I do not believe I shall leave behind me, yourself and family excepted, and perhaps my mother, a single being who will care what becomes of me.’”

From his expressions in a letter to Mrs. Byron, already cited, that he must “do something in the House soon,” as well as from a more definite intimation of the same intention to Mr. Harness, it would appear that he had, at this time, serious thoughts of at once entering on the high political path which his station as an hereditary legislator opened to him.  But, whatever may have been the first movements of his ambition in this direction, they were soon relinquished.  Had he been connected with any distinguished political families, his love of eminence, seconded by such example and sympathy, would have impelled him, no doubt, to