a time when anecdotes like these
obtained some credence from persons who, hating the French Emperor
without knowing why, were eager to believe any thing which might justify
their hatred.

"Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen were in a bad humor
with him. His writings and his character had lost the charm of novelty.
He had been guilty of the offense which, of all offenses, is punished
most severely; he had been overpraised; he had excited too warm an
interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised him for its
own folly. The attachments of the multitude bear no small resemblance to
those of the wanton enchantress in the Arabian Tales, who, when the
forty days of her fondness were over, was not content with dismissing
her lovers, but condemned them to expiate, in loathsome shapes, and
under cruel penances, the crime of having once pleased her too well.

"The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have
shaken a more constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons.
The theatres shook with execrations. He was excluded from circles where
he had lately been the _observed_ of all _observers_. All those creeping
things that riot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their
repast; and they were right; they did after their kind. It is not every
day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies
of such a spirit, and the degradation of such a name. The unhappy man
left his country forever. The howl of contumely followed him across the
sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually waxed fainter; it died
away; those who had raised it began to ask each other, what, after all,
was the matter about which they had been so clamorous, and wished to
invite back the criminal whom they had just chased from them. His poetry
became more popular than it had ever been; and his complaints were read
with tears by thousands and tens of thousands who had never seen his
face."

These observations of Macaulay are applied by Mr. Disraeli to Lord
Cadurcis, who, in his novel called "Venetia," is no other than Lord
Byron:--

"Lord Cadurcis," says he, "was the periodical victim, the scapegoat of
English morality, sent into the wilderness with all the crimes and
curses of the multitude on his head. Lord Cadurcis had certainly
committed a great crime, not his intrigue with Lady Monteagle, for that
surely was not an unprecedented offense; nor his duel with her husband,
for after