“Ev’n I, least thinking of a thoughtless throng,
      Just skill’d to know the right and choose the wrong,
      Freed at that age when Reason’s shield is lost
      To fight my course through Passion’s countless host,
      Whom every path of Pleasure’s flowery way
      Has lured in turn, and all have led astray[105]—­
      Ev’n I must raise my voice, ev’n I must feel
      Such scenes, such men destroy the public weal: 
      Although some kind, censorious friend will say,
      ‘What art thou better, meddling fool,[106] than they?’
      And every brother Rake will smile to see
      That miracle, a Moralist, in me.”

But the passage in which, hastily thrown off as it is, we find the strongest traces of that wounded feeling, which bleeds, as it were, through all his subsequent writings, is the following:—­

    “The time hath been, when no harsh sound would fall
    From lips that now may seem imbued with gall,
    Nor fools nor follies tempt me to despise
    The meanest thing that crawl’d beneath my eyes. 
    But now so callous grown, so changed from youth,” &c.

Some of the causes that worked this change in his character have been intimated in the course of the preceding pages.  That there was no tinge of bitterness in his natural disposition, we have abundant testimony, besides his own, to prove.  Though, as a child, occasionally passionate and headstrong, his docility and kindness towards those who were themselves kind, is acknowledged by all; and “playful” and “affectionate” are invariably the epithets by which those who knew him in his childhood convey their impression of his character.

Of all the qualities, indeed, of his nature, affectionateness seems to have been the most ardent and most deep.  A disposition, on his own side, to form strong attachments, and a yearning desire after affection in return, were the feeling and the want that formed the dream and torment of his existence.  We have seen with what passionate enthusiasm he threw himself into his boyish friendships.  The all-absorbing and unsuccessful love that followed was, if I may so say, the agony, without being the death, of this unsated desire, which lived on through his life, and filled his poetry with the very soul of tenderness, lent the colouring of its light to even those unworthy ties which vanity or passion led him afterwards to form, and was the last aspiration of his fervid spirit in those stanzas written but a few months before his death:—­

“’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it has ceased to move;
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!”