divine Founder of Christianity. 'I always
took great delight,' observed he, 'in the English Cathedral service. It
can not fail to inspire every man who feels at all, with devotion.
Notwithstanding which, Christianity is not the best source of
inspiration for a poet. No poet should be tied down to a direct
profession of faith. Metaphysics open a vast field. Nature and
heterodoxy present to the poet's imagination fertile sources from which
Christianity forbids him to draw;' and he exemplified his meaning by a
review of the works of Tasso and Milton.

"'Here is a little book somebody has sent me about Christianity," he
said to Shelley and me, 'that has made me very uncomfortable. The
reasoning seems to me very strong, the proofs are very staggering. I
don't think you can answer it, Shelley; at least, I am sure I can't,
and, what is more, I don't wish to do so.'"

Speaking of Gibbon, he says,--"L---- B---- thought the question set at
rest in the 'History of the Decline and Fall,' but I am not so easily
convinced. It is not a matter of volition to unbelieve. Who likes to own
that he has been a fool all his life,--to unlearn all that he has been
taught in his youth? Or can think that some of the best men that ever
lived have been fools?" And again,--

"You believe in Plato's three principles, why not in the Trinity? One is
not more mystical than the other. I don't know why I am considered an
enemy to religion, and an unbeliever. I disowned the other day that I
was of Shelley's school in metaphysics, though I admired his poetry."

"Although," says Lord Harrington, "Byron was no Christian, he was a firm
believer in the existence of a God. It is, therefore, equally remote
from truth to represent him as either an atheist or a Christian. He was,
as he has often told me, a confirmed Deist." Further on, the same
writer adds:--

"Byron always maintained that he was a skeptic, but he was not so at
all. During a ride at Cephalonia, which lasted two or three hours almost
without a pause, he began to talk about 'Cain' and his religious
opinions, and he condemned all atheists, and maintained the principles
of Deism." Mr. Finlay, who used to see Lord Byron in Greece, says, in a
letter to his friend Lord Harrington:--

"Lord Byron liked exceedingly to converse upon religious topics, but I
never once heard him openly profess to be a Deist."

These quotations are sufficiently numerous, and all point to the same
conclusion, but I must