efore already marked out in Byron's heart, even
before he was fortunate enough to know him.

Moore's straitened means often obliged him to leave London. Then Byron
was seized with a fit of melancholy.

"I might be sentimental to-day, but I won't," he said. "The truth is
that I have done all I can since I am in this world to harden my heart,
and have not yet succeeded, though there is a good chance of my doing
so.

"I wish your line and mine were a little less parallel, they might
occasionally meet, which they do not now.

"I am sometimes inclined to write that I am ill, so as to see you arrive
in London, where no one was ever so happy to see you as I am, and where
there is no one I would sooner seek consolation from, were I ill."

Then, according to his habitual custom of ever depreciating himself
morally, he writes to Moore, in answer to the latter's compliments about
his goodness: "But they say the devil is amusing when pleased, and I
must have been more venomous than the old serpent, to have hissed or
stung in your company."

His sympathy for Moore went so far as to induce him to believe that he
was capable of every thing that is good.

"Moore," says he, in his memoranda of 1813, "has a reunion of
exceptional talents--poetry, music, voice, he has all--and an expression
of countenance such as no one will ever have.

"What humor in his poet's bag! There is nothing that Moore can not do if
he wishes.

"He has but one fault, which I mourn every day--he is not here."

He even liked to attribute to Moore successes which the latter only owed
to himself. Byron had, as the reader knows, the most musical of voices.
Once heard, it could not be forgotten.[26] He had never learned music,
but his ear was so just, that when he hummed a tune his voice was so
touching as to move one to tears.

"Not a day passes," he wrote to Moore, "that I don't think and speak of
you. You can not doubt my sincere admiration, waiving personal
friendship for the present. I have you by rote and by heart, of which
_ecce signum_."

He then goes on to tell him his adventure when at Lady O----'s:--

"I have a habit of uttering, to what I think tunes, your 'Oh, breathe
not,' and others; they are my matins and vespers. I did not intend them
to be overheard, but one morning in comes not la Donna, but il Marita,
with a very grave face, and said, 'Byron, I must request you not to sing
any more, at least of those songs.'--'Why?'--'They make my wi