chemist, Mann, had cured him of it in three days, that it always
yielded to a few doses of salts, and that the phenomenon always recurred
and ended at the same hours. It appears, then, to me, that all these
symptoms are far from indicating a serious and incurable hereditary
malady, which would not be likely to have yielded to doses of salts, and
which his general good health would seem to exclude. I consider them
rather to point, for their cause, to his diet, which was _quite
insufficient for him, and even hurtful, likely to affect the most robust
health, and much more that of a man whose organization was so sensitive
and delicate_. And, as this system of denying his body what was
necessary for it increased the demands of his mind, which in its turn
revenged itself on the body, the result was that Lord Byron voluntarily
failed in the duties which every man owes to himself. Therefore, I think
it more just to rank the melancholy arising from such causes, among his
_faults_, and not among the accidents of life, or his natural
disposition.[194]

Now, having examined his melancholy under all its phases, having proved
more what it was not than what it was, we shall sum up with saying, that
Lord Byron really experienced, during his short life, every kind of
sadness. First, in early youth, he had to encounter disappointments,
mortifications, disenchantments, deep moral suffering; then the constant
warfare of envy, resulting in cruel, unceasing slanders: then, all the
philosophical sadness arising in great minds, the best endowed and the
noblest, from the emptiness of earthly things; then that unslakable
thirst for the true, the just, the perfect; that sort of nostalgia which
the noblest souls experience, because their home is not here, because
reality disgusts them, from the striking contrast it presents with the
ideal type, in their mind, especially at our epoch, and in our present
social condition, when men can with difficulty preserve interior calm
by dint of compulsory occupations requiring much energy. And, lastly,
there was the sadness inherent to a physical temperament of such
exquisite sensibility. Yet, notwithstanding all the above, and though
Lord Byron was condemned to drain the cup of bitterness to its dregs, we
think he ought not to be classed among geniuses exclusively swayed by
the melancholy in their nature, since almost all his sadness sprang from
accident, and from a sort of fictitious temperament produced by