his graver works have of melancholy, commonly believed to
have been (I think unjustly) the predominant trait in his
character."[149]

Many others have said the same thing. The truth is, that if by giving
way to reflection--which was a necessity of his genius--and through
circumstances--which were a fatality of his destiny--he has shown
himself melancholy in his writings and very often in his dispositions,
it is no less certain that by temperament and taste, by the activity,
penetration, and complex character of his mind, he very often showed
himself to be extremely gay. No one better than he seized upon the
absurd and ridiculous side of things or more easily found cause for
laughter. His gayety--the result of a frank, open, volatile nature, full
of varying moods--was easily excited by any absurdities, ridiculous
pretensions, or witty sallies; and then he became so expansive and
charming, body and soul with him both seemed to laugh in such unison,
that it was impossible not to catch the contagion; but his laughter was
ever devoid of malice. Slight defects of harmony in things, or
proportion, or mutual relation, easily gave rise to mirthful sensations
in him. Being full of admiration for the beautiful, and having,
moreover, a great sense of mutual fitness, and much activity of mind, it
was with extraordinary and instinctive promptitude that he seized upon
the contradictory relations existing between objects, and indeed on all
showing a voluntary absence of order and beauty in the conduct of free
reasonable beings. His laughter was then quite as aesthetical as it was
innocent. And even if it were not admitted, as it is by all
philosophical moralists, that no sort of personal calculation enters
into this entirely spontaneous emotion, no sentiment of superiority over
the being we are laughing at--for _selfishness and laughter never
coexist_--if it were possible, I say, to doubt all this, even then to
see Lord Byron laugh would have sufficed to give the right conviction.
For truly his mirth was a charming thing; the very air surrounding him
appeared to laugh.

Then would his soul, that often required to emerge from its deep
reflections, unbend itself, and alternately disport or repose in utter
self-abandonment. It dismissed thought, as it were, in order to become a
child again; to deliver itself over to all the caprices of those myriad
changeful fugitive impressions that course through the brain at moments
of excitement.