ch will be found in the following pages.[3]

Sanguinely as I was led to augur of the reception of our First Volume,
of the success of that which we now present to the public, I am
disposed to feel even still more confident. Though self-banished from
England, it was plain that to England alone Lord Byron continued to
look, throughout the remainder of his days, not only as the natural
theatre of his literary fame, but as the tribunal to which all his
thoughts, feelings, virtues, and frailties were to be referred; and
the exclamation of Alexander, "Oh, Athenians, how much it costs me to
obtain your praises!" might have been, with equal truth, addressed by
the noble exile to his countrymen. To keep the minds of the English
public for ever occupied about him,--if not with his merits, with his
faults; if not in applauding, in blaming him,--was, day and night,
the constant ambition of his soul; and in the correspondence he so
regularly maintained with his publisher, one of the chief mediums
through which this object was to be effected lay. Mr. Murray's house
being then, as now, the resort of most of those literary men who are,
at the same time, men of the world, his Lordship knew that whatever
particulars he might wish to make public concerning himself, would, if
transmitted to that quarter, be sure to circulate from thence
throughout society. It was on this presumption that he but rarely, as
we shall find him more than once stating, corresponded with any others
of his friends at home; and to the mere accident of my having been,
myself, away from England, at the time, was I indebted for the
numerous and no less interesting letters with which, during the same
period, he honoured me, and which now enrich this volume.

In these two sets of correspondence (given, as they are here, with as
little suppression as a regard to private feelings and to certain
other considerations, warrants) will be found a complete history, from
the pen of the poet himself, of the course of his life and thoughts,
during this most energetic period of his whole career;--presenting
altogether so wide a canvass of animated and, often, unconscious
self-portraiture, as even the communicative spirit of genius has
seldom, if ever, before bestowed on the world.

Some insinuations, calling into question the disinterestedness of the
lady whose fate was connected with that of Lord Byron during his
latter years, having been brought forward, or rather revived, in a