oke of it with a sense of gratification. These
instances, as well as others, of gratuitous spleen, only justified
the misrepresentations which had been insinuated against himself, and
what was humour in his nature, was ascribed to vice in his
principles.

Before the year was at an end, his popularity was evidently beginning
to wane: of this he was conscious himself, and braved the frequent
attacks on his character and genius with an affectation of
indifference, under which those who had at all observed the singular
associations of his recollections and ideas, must have discerned the
symptoms of a strange disease. He was tainted with a Herodian malady
of the mind: his thoughts were often hateful to himself; but there
was an ecstasy in the conception, as if delight could be mingled with
horror. I think, however, he struggled to master the fatality, and
that his resolution to marry was dictated by an honourable desire to
give hostages to society, against the wild wilfulness of his
imagination.

It is a curious and a mystical fact, that at the period to which I am
alluding, and a very short time, only a little month, before he
successfully solicited the hand of Miss Milbanke, being at Newstead,
he fancied that he saw the ghost of the monk which is supposed to
haunt the abbey, and to make its ominous appearance when misfortune
or death impends over the master of the mansion.--The story of the
apparition in the sixteenth canto of Don Juan is derived from this
family legend, and Norman Abbey, in the thirteenth of the same poem,
is a rich and elaborate description of Newstead.

After his proposal to Miss Milbanke had been accepted, a considerable
time, nearly three months, elapsed before the marriage was completed,
in consequence of the embarrassed condition in which, when the
necessary settlements were to be made, he found his affairs. This
state of things, with the previous unhappy controversy with himself,
and anger at the world, was ill-calculated to gladden his nuptials:
but, besides these real evils, his mind was awed with gloomy
presentiments, a shadow of some advancing misfortune darkened his
spirit, and the ceremony was performed with sacrificial feelings, and
those dark and chilling circumstances, which he has so touchingly
described in The Dream:--

I saw him stand
Before an altar with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The starlight of his boyhood:--as he stood
Even