i_."

It was thus that he judged what is called the great world, the
fashionable crowd. Yet never having ceased to frequent it, he also might
have said, with Plutarch:--"My taste leads me to fly the world; but the
gentleness of my nature brings me back to it again."

The best proof, however, of his sociable disposition does not lie in
this fact of his going much to great assemblies, since he submitted to,
rather than sought after that: it consists in the pleasure he always
took in the society of friends, and those whom he loved; in the want of
_intimacy_ which he ever experienced. In such quiet little circles he
was truly himself, quite different to what he appeared in salons. Then
only could he be really known. His wit, gayety, and simplicity were
unveiled solely for friends and intimates. He, so light-hearted, became
serious amid the forced laughter of drawing-rooms; he, so witty, waxed
silent and gloomy amid unmeaning conventional talkativeness. Those who
only saw him in salons, or on fashionable staircases, during the four
years he passed in England, did not really know him; is it surprising
that he should have been wrongly judged? Moore alone has tolerably well
described the agreeable, sociable, gay, kind being Lord Byron was.

When he quitted England, his sociable disposition did not abandon him,
though his soul was filled with bitterness. He had scarcely arrived at
Geneva, when he became intimate with Shelley. He made him the companion
of his walks, passed whole days and evenings in his society, and that of
his amiable wife. Several London friends came to join him in
Switzerland. In his excursions over the Alps, Lord Broughton (then Mr.
Hobhouse) was always his faithful companion. He frequented and
appreciated then, more than he had ever done before in England, the
society of Madame de Stael at Coppet, because it was there and not in
drawing-rooms that this noble-hearted woman showed herself what she was.
Always attracted by high intellect, he became intimate with Count Rossi,
entertaining so great a sympathy for him, that often when the count was
about to leave him and return to Geneva, Lord Byron retained him by his
entreaties. As to the natives of Geneva, as he detested Calvinism, and
knew that they believed the calumnies wickedly spread abroad against him
by some of his country-people, he did not see them often, for he did not
like them. "What are you going to do in that den of honest men," said he
one day