dash of the box and dice, and the glorious uncertainty, not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all, as one had sometimes to throw often to decide at all.  I have thrown as many as fourteen mains running, and carried off all the cash upon the table occasionally; but I had no coolness, or judgment, or calculation.  It was the delight of the thing that pleased me.  Upon the whole, I left off in time, without being much a winner or loser.  Since one-and-twenty years of age I played but little, and then never above a hundred, or two, or three.”

To this, and other follies of the same period, he alludes in the following note:—­

TO MR. WILLIAM BANKES.

“Twelve o’clock, Friday night.

“My dear Bankes,

“I have just received your note; believe me I regret most sincerely that I was not fortunate enough to see it before, as I need not repeat to you that your conversation for half an hour would have been much more agreeable to me than gambling or drinking, or any other fashionable mode of passing an evening abroad or at home.—­I really am very sorry that I went out previous to the arrival of your despatch:  in future pray let me hear from you before six, and whatever my engagements may be, I will always postpone them.—­Believe me, with that deference which I have always from my childhood paid to your talents, and with somewhat a better opinion of your heart than I have hitherto entertained,

“Yours ever,” &c.

Among the causes—­if not rather among the results—­of that disposition to melancholy, which, after all, perhaps, naturally belonged to his temperament, must not be forgotten those sceptical views of religion, which clouded, as has been shown, his boyish thoughts, and, at the time of which I am speaking, gathered still more darkly over his mind.  In general we find the young too ardently occupied with the enjoyments which this life gives or promises to afford either leisure or inclination for much enquiry into the mysteries of the next.  But with him it was unluckily otherwise; and to have, at once, anticipated the worst experience both of the voluptuary and the reasoner,—­to have reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world’s pleasures, and see nothing but “clouds and darkness” beyond, was the doom, the anomalous doom, which a nature, premature in all its passions and powers, inflicted on Lord Byron.

When Pope, at the age of five-and-twenty, complained of being weary of the world, he was told by Swift that he “had not yet acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it."[111] But far different was the youth of Pope and of Byron;—­what the former but anticipated in thought, the latter had drunk deep of in reality;—­at an age when the one was but looking forth on the sea of life, the other had plunged in, and tried its depths.  Swift himself, in whom early disappointments and wrongs had opened a vein of bitterness that never again closed, affords a far closer parallel to the fate of our noble poet,[112] as well in the untimeliness of the trials he had been doomed to encounter, as in the traces of their havoc which they left in his character.