“My passions” (he says, in his ‘Detached Thoughts’) “were developed very early—­so early that few would believe me if I were to state the period and the facts which accompanied it.  Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts,—­having anticipated life.  My earlier poems are the thoughts of one at least ten years older than the age at which they were written,—­I don’t mean for their solidity, but their experience.  The two first Cantos of Childe Harold were completed at twenty-two; and they are written as if by a man older than I shall probably ever be.”

Though the allusions in the first sentence of this extract have reference to a much earlier period, they afford an opportunity of remarking, that however dissipated may have been the life which he led during the two or three years previous to his departure on his travels, yet the notion caught up by many, from his own allusions, in Childe Harold, to irregularities and orgies of which Newstead had been the scene, is, like most other imputations against him, founded on his own testimony, greatly exaggerated.  He describes, it is well known, the home of his poetical representative as a “monastic dome, condemned to uses vile,” and then adds,—­

    “Where Superstition once had made her den,
    Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile.”

Mr. Dallas, too, giving in to the same strain of exaggeration, says, in speaking of the poet’s preparations for his departure, “already satiated with pleasure, and disgusted with those companions who have no other resource, he had resolved on mastering his appetites;—­he broke up his harams.”  The truth, however, is, that the narrowness of Lord Byron’s means would alone have prevented such oriental luxuries.  The mode of his life at Newstead was simple and unexpensive.  His companions, though not averse to convivial indulgences, were of habits and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery; and, with respect to the alleged “harams,” it appears certain that one or two suspected “subintroductae” (as the ancient monks of the abbey would have styled them), and those, too, among the ordinary menials of the establishment, were all that even scandal itself could ever fix upon to warrant such an assumption.

That gaming was among his follies at this period he himself tells us in the journal I have just cited:—­

“I have a notion (he says) that gamblers are as happy as many people, being always excited.  Women, wine, fame, the table,—­even ambition, sate now and then; but every turn of the card and cast of the dice keeps the gamester alive:  besides, one can game ten times longer than one can do any thing else.  I was very fond of it when young, that is to say, of hazard, for I hate all card games,—­even faro.  When macco (or whatever they spell it) was introduced, I gave up the whole thing, for I loved and missed the rattle and