med his breast, and
appeasing his ardent thirst after truth. We have given too many proofs
of all this to require to insist upon it any further.

We have also seen that it was disagreeable to him to be admired and
praised without having merited it. He felt the same repugnance to
seeking for popularity. When "Childe Harold" appeared, Dallas advised
him to alter some passages, because, he said, certain metaphysical ideas
expressed in the poem might do him harm in public opinion, and that, at
twenty-three years of age, it was well to court in an honorable way the
suffrages of his countrymen, and to abstain from wounding their
feelings, opinions, and even their prejudices.[132] Lord Byron
replied:--

"I feel that you are right, but I also feel that I am sincere, and that
if I am only to write _ad captandum vulgus_, I might as well edit a
magazine at once, or concoct songs for Vauxhall."[133]

And yet when he wrote thus to Dallas he had not arrived at any
popularity.

Soon, however, it came to him unsought; but he did not appreciate it
nor flatter it to stay, as an ambitious man would not have failed to do.
On the contrary, his noble independence of character and incapacity for
flattering the multitude gained strength every day. Proofs of the same
abound at every period of his life.

"If I valued fame," he said in his memoranda, 1813, "I should flatter
received opinions, which have gathered strength by time, and which will
last longer than any living works that are opposed to them. But, for the
soul of me, I can not and will not give the lie to my own thoughts and
doubts, come what may. If I am a fool, I am, at least, a doubting one;
and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom."

And then, at the same time, he wrote:--

"If I had any views in this country they would probably be
parliamentary. But I have no ambition; at least, if any, it would be
'_aut Caesar aut nihil_.' My hopes are limited to the arrangement of my
affairs, and settling either in Italy or in the East (rather the last),
and drinking deep of the language and literature of both."

The catastrophe that overtook Napoleon, his hero, and the success of
fools, quite overcame him at this time:--

"Past events have unnerved me, and all I can now do is to make life an
amusement and look on while others play. After all, even the highest
game of crosses and sceptres, what is it? _Vide_ Napoleon's last
twelvemonth," etc., etc.

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