inevitable circumstances, it will be a
kind of satisfaction to retain, in these images of the living, the idea
of our former selves, and to contemplate, in the resemblances of the
dead, all that remains of judgment, feeling, and a host of passions."

If misanthropy had not been an element heterogeneous to his character,
it might well have assumed larger proportions at this moment; for, on
the very eve of his departure from England, his heart had yet to suffer
one of those chilling shocks to which sensitive natures, removed far
above the usual temperature of the world, says Moore, are only too much
exposed. And this proof of coldness, which he complains of with
indignation in a note to the second canto of "Childe Harold," was given
precisely by one of the friends he most loved. Mr. Dallas, who witnessed
the immediate effect produced by this mark of coldness, thus describes
it:

"I found him bursting with indignation. '_Will you believe it?_' said
he, 'I _have just_ met ---- and asked him to come and sit an hour with
me; he excused himself; and what do you think was his excuse? He was
engaged with his mother and some ladies to go shopping! And he knows I
set out to-morrow to be absent for years, perhaps never to return?
Friendship! I do not believe I shall leave behind me, yourself and
family excepted, and perhaps my mother, a single being who will care
what becomes of me!'"[167]

The conduct of this friend gave him so much pain, that a year after he
wrote again about it, from Constantinople, to Dallas:--

"The only person I counted would feel grieved at my departure took leave
of me with such coldness, that if I had not known the heart of man I
should have been surprised. I should have attributed it to some offenses
on my part, had I ever been guilty of aught save _too much affection_
for him."

Dallas thought that some lady, from a spirit of vengeance, had excited
this young man to slight Lord Byron.

I will not here seek to discover whether he was right or wrong. It
suffices that he could believe it, for me to say, that this singular
misanthropy, born of heart-deceptions, was in reality nothing else but
grief, the causes of which might each be enumerated, but the intensity
of which we do not really know, since that deep capacity is the sad
privilege of beings highly endowed.

In any case, it is certain that when he left England the measure of
disappointments capable of producing real melancholy in such a sensit