Among Lord Byron's natural qualities we may rank his antipathy, not only
for any thing like low sensuality or gross vice, but even for those
follies to which youth and human nature are so prone. Whatever may have
been said on this head, and notwithstanding the countenance Lord Byron's
own words may have lent to calumnies too widely believed, it will be
easy to prove the truth of our assertion. Let us examine his actions,
his words (when serious), the testimony of those who knew him through
life, and it will soon appear that this natural antipathy with him often
attained to the height of rare virtue.

Lord Byron had a passionate nature, a feeling heart, a powerful
imagination; and it can not be denied that, after the disappointment he
experienced in his ethereal love entertained at fifteen, he fell into
the usual round of university life. But as he possessed great refinement
of mind, never losing sight of an ideal of moral beauty, such an
existence speedily became odious to him. His companions thought it all
quite natural and pleasant; but he disapproved of it and blamed himself,
feeling ashamed in his own conscience.

It is well known that Lord Byron never spared himself. He invented
faults rather than sought to extenuate them. And so he fully merits
belief, when he happens to do himself justice. Let us attend to the
following:--

"I passed my degrees in vice," he says, "very quickly, _but they were
not after my taste_. For my juvenile passions, though most violent, were
concentrated, and did not willingly tend to divide and expand on several
objects. I could have renounced every thing in the world with those I
loved, or lost it all for them; but fiery though my nature was, _I
could not share without disgust in the dissipation common to the place,
and time._"

This makes Moore say, that even at the period to which we are alluding,
his irregularities were much less sensual, much less gross and varied
than those of his companions.

Nevertheless it was his boyish university life that caused Lord Byron to
be suspected of drawing his own likeness, when two years later, after
his return from the East, he brought out "Childe Harold"--an imaginary
hero, whom he imprudently surrounded with real circumstances personal to
himself.

Moore, with his usual good sense, protests strongly against such
injustice, saying that, however dissipated his college and university
life might have been during the two or three years previ