m were not so slight at this period, although he considered them
such[190] out of the superabundance of his philosophical spirit; and the
year that began with so many contradictions, ended in the same manner.
The hope of seeing the Counts Gamba back again at Ravenna was daily
lessening. All the letters Madame G---- wrote to him from Florence and
Pisa, penned as they were amid the anguish of fear lest Lord Byron
should be assassinated at Ravenna, were necessarily pregnant with alarm
and affliction.

Meanwhile his interests were being neglected in London. Murray irritated
him by his inexplicable negligence or worried him with sending foolish
publications and provoking reviews. Gifford, a critic he loved and
revered, from whom no praise, he said, could compensate for any
blame,--Gifford, whose ideas on the drama were quite opposite to his
own, had just been censuring his beautiful dramatic compositions.[191]
Moreover, Italy having failed in her attempts at independence, was
insulted in her misfortune by that world which smiles only on success,
and thus, indirectly, the persons loved and esteemed by Lord Byron came
in for their share of outrage. And all these contradictions, _where_ and
_when_ did he experience them? At Ravenna, in a solitude and isolation
that would have made the bravest stoic shudder, and that was prejudicial
to him without his being aware of it. For there were two distinct
temperaments in Lord Byron, that of his genius and that of his humanity,
and the wants of one were not always those of the other. The first, from
its nature and manifestations, required solitude. The second, eminently
sociable, while yielding to the tyranny of the first, or bearing it from
force of circumstance, suffered nevertheless when solitude became too
complete. It was not the society of the great world, nor what are called
its pleasures, that Lord Byron required; but a society of friends and
clever persons capable of affording a little diversion to his monotonous
life. When this twofold want did not meet with reasonable satisfaction,
a certain degree of melancholy necessarily developed itself. "_When he
was not thrown into some unbearable sort of solitude, like that in which
he found himself at Ravenna_," says Madame G----," _his good-humor and
gayety only varied when letters from England came to move and agitate
him, or when he suffered morally_.

"_I must, however, add that all sensitive agents, all atmospherical
impressions,