as constant to a certain order of ideas, was he
equally constant in his affections? Moore again shall answer:--

"The same distrust in his own steadiness, thus keeping alive in him a
conscientious self-watchfulness, concurred not a little, I have no
doubt, with the innate, kindness of his nature, to preserve so constant
and unbroken the greater number of his attachments through life--some of
them, as in the instance of his mother, owing evidently more to a sense
of duty than of real affection, the consistency with which, so
creditably to the strength of his character, they were maintained."

But, putting aside family affections, where constancy may appear a duty
and a necessity, let us see what Lord Byron was in affections of his own
choice,--such as friendship and love, where inconstancy is a sin that
the world easily forgives.

We have seen what the friendship of Lord Byron meant. Death destroyed
several of the young existences with which his heart was bound up, and
his first sorrows sprang from these misfortunes. But _never_ by his
will, caprice, or fault, did he lose a single friend! Even the wrongs
they inflicted, while they weighed upon his mind, altered his opinions
sometimes, dispelled some sweet illusions and grieved his heart, yet
could not succeed in changing it. He contented himself with judging the
individual in such cases, sometimes with philosophical indulgence which
he was only too much accustomed to hide under the veil of pleasantry,
and sometimes in showing openly how much his heart was wounded.[70]

This constancy of heart that he showed in friendship, was it equally his
in matters of love? By his energy of soul, unable ever to forget any
thing, Lord Byron possessed the first condition toward constancy in
love. Contrary to those unstable persons who say that they cease to
love, for the simple reason that they have already loved too much, it
might rather be said of Lord Byron that he still loved on only because
he had loved. In all his poems, he has idealized fidelity and constancy
in love. All the heroes of his poems are faithful and constant, from
Conrad, Lara, Selim, all those of the Oriental poems of his youth, up to
those of his latter life, to his Biblical mysteries. Even the angels,
the seraphim, in that beautiful poem, written shortly before his death,
"Heaven and Earth," prefer suffering to inconstancy,--to forfeit heaven
rather than return there without their beloved. In vain the archangel