come to this? He sighed and sipped, quaffed and sighed. The spell of the
old stored sunshine seemed not to work, this time. He could not cease
from plucking at the net of ignominies in which his soul lay enmeshed.
Would that he had died yesterday, escaping how much!

Not for an instant did he flinch from the mere fact of dying to-day.
Since he was not immortal, as he had supposed, it were as well he should
die now as fifty years hence. Better, indeed. To die "untimely," as men
called it, was the timeliest of all deaths for one who had carved his
youth to greatness. What perfection could he, Dorset, achieve beyond
what was already his? Future years could but stale, if not actually
mar, that perfection. Yes, it was lucky to perish leaving much to the
imagination of posterity. Dear posterity was of a sentimental, not
a realistic, habit. She always imagined the dead young hero prancing
gloriously up to the Psalmist's limit a young hero still; and it was the
sense of her vast loss that kept his memory green. Byron!--he would be
all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with
iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to "The Times"
about the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Yes, Byron would have been that. It
was indicated in him. He would have been an old gentleman exacerbated by
Queen Victoria's invincible prejudice against him, her brusque refusal
to "entertain" Lord John Russell's timid nomination of him for a post
in the Government... Shelley would have been a poet to the last. But how
dull, how very dull, would have been the poetry of his middle age!--a
great unreadable mass interposed between him and us... Did Byron, mused
the Duke, know what was to be at Missolonghi? Did he know that he was
to die in service of the Greeks whom he despised? Byron might not have
minded that. But what if the Greeks had told him, in so many words,
that they despised HIM? How would he have felt then? Would he have been
content with his potations of barley-water?... The Duke replenished his
glass, hoping the spell might work yet.... Perhaps, had Byron not been a
dandy--but ah, had he not been in his soul a dandy there would have
been no Byron worth mentioning. And it was because he guarded not his
dandyism against this and that irrelevant passion, sexual or political,
that he cut so annoyingly incomplete a figure. He was absurd in his
politics, vulgar in his loves. Only in himself, at the times when he
stood ha