It is much, I own, to be questioned, whether, even under the most favourable circumstances, a disposition such as I have here described could have escaped ultimate disappointment, or found any where a resting-place for its imaginings and desires.  But, in the case of Lord Byron, disappointment met him on the very threshold of life.  His mother, to whom his affections first, naturally with ardour, turned, either repelled them rudely, or capriciously trifled with them.  In speaking of his early days to a friend at Genoa, a short time before his departure for Greece, he traced the first feelings of pain and humiliation he had ever known to the coldness with which his mother had received his caresses in infancy, and the frequent taunts on his personal deformity with which she had wounded him.

The sympathy of a sister’s love, of all the influences on the mind of a youth the most softening, was also, in his early days, denied to him,—­his sister Augusta and he having seen but little of each other while young.  A vent through the calm channel of domestic affections might have brought down the high current of his feelings to a level nearer that of the world he had to traverse, and thus saved them from the tumultuous rapids and falls to which this early elevation, in their after-course, exposed them.  In the dearth of all home-endearments, his heart had no other resource but in those boyish friendships which he formed at school; and when these were interrupted by his removal to Cambridge, he was again thrown back, isolated, on his own restless desires.  Then followed his ill-fated attachment to Miss Chaworth, to which, more than to any other cause, he himself attributed the desolating change then wrought in his disposition.

“I doubt sometimes (he says, in his ‘Detached Thoughts,’) whether, after all, a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me; yet I sometimes long for it.  My earliest dreams (as most boys’ dreams are) were martial; but a little later they were all for love and retirement, till the hopeless attachment to M——­ C——­ began and continued (though sedulously concealed) very early in my teens; and so upwards for a time. This threw me out again ’alone on a wide, wide sea.’  In the year 1804 I recollect meeting my sister at General Harcourt’s, in Portland Place.  I was then one thing, and as she had always till then found me.  When we met again in 1805 (she told me since) that my temper and disposition were so completely altered, that I was hardly to be recognised.  I was not then sensible of the change; but I can believe it, and account for it.”