had been drawn into this stormy
current were seized with regret and remorse. "_Why did we thus rise
against our spoilt and favorite child?_" The wicked knew well wherefore
they had done it, but the good did not. Macaulay told it them one day,
twenty years afterward, better than any one else has, in one of those
passages where the beauty of his style, far from injuring truth, lends
it a double charm, enhancing it just as nature's beauty is set off by a
profusion of light.

This good feeling stealing over the public conscience alarmed Lord
Byron's deadly enemies. They feared lest sentimental remorse should
compromise their victory; and they manoeuvred so well, that from that
hour persecution took up permanent abode in England, under pretext of
offense to religion or morals. It followed him on his heroic journey
into Greece, and ceased not with his death. Even after that, the
vengeance and rage of his enemies--the indiscretion and timidity of
friends--the material or moral speculations of all, together with the
assurance of impunity--continued to feed the fire which an end so
glorious as his ought to have quenched.[207]

But if the war against him did not cease, his perseverance and courage
in saying what he thought did not cease either. Who more than he
despised popularity and literary success, if they were to be purchased
at the cost of truth?

"Were I alone against the world," said he, "I would not exchange my
freedom of thought for a throne." And again: "He who wishes not to be a
despot, or a slave, may speak freely."

That such independence of mind, aided by such high genius, should have
alarmed certain coteries--not to speak of certain political and
religious sets, who were all powerful--may easily be conceived. We can
not feel surprise at the scandals they got up in defense of their
privileges, when attacked by a new power who made every species of
baseness and hypocrisy tremble; nor can we wonder that, unknowing where
it would stop, they should have sought to cast discredit on the oracle
by slandering the man. That the bark bearing him to exile should have
been pushed on by a wind of angry passions in coalition--by a breeze not
winged by conscience--may also be conceived; but to _conceive_ is not to
absolve, and in using the above expression we only mean to allow due
share to human nature in general--to the character, manners, and perhaps
to the special requirements of England. And if we ought not to condone