February 20th, 1816.

"You need not be in any apprehension or grief on my account. Were I
to be beaten down by the world and its inheritors, I should have
succumbed to many things years ago. You must not mistake my not
bullying for dejection; nor imagine that because I feel, I am to
faint."[80]

In all he wrote at this fatal period of his life, one perceives the wide
gaping wound, which is however endured with the strength of a Titan, who
at twenty-nine is to become quite a philosopher, good, gentle, almost
resigned.

"The camel labors with the heaviest load,
And the wolf dies in silence,--not bestow'd
In vain should such example be; if they,
Things of ignoble or of savage mood,
Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay
May temper it to bear,--it is but for a day."[81]

Like all those who feel deeply the joys and griefs of their fellow-men,
Lord Byron had received from nature all that could render him capable
of moderating the external expression of his sensibility, when injustice
was personal to himself. Moreover, circumstances, alas! had only too
much favored the development of this noble faculty in him. For, very
early, he had received severe lessons from those terrible masters who
nurture great souls to self-control; from reverses, vanished illusions,
perils, wrongs. The storms however it was his destiny to encounter,
though violent, not only did not cause him to be shipwrecked, but even
helped to encircle his brow with the martyr's halo.

But, we may be asked, whether this great control which Lord Byron
exercised over himself, with regard to obstacles, dangers, and human
injustice, existed equally with regard to his own passions. To those who
should doubt it, and who, forgetting that Lord Byron only lived the age
of passions, without taking into consideration all the circumstances
that rendered difficult to him what is easier for others, should pretend
that Lord Byron gave way to his passions oftener than he warred against
them, to such we would say: "What was he doing, then, when, at barely
twenty-two years of age, he adopted an anchorite's _regime_, so as to
render his soul more _independent_ of _matter_? When he shut himself up
at home, with the self-imposed task of writing whole poems before he
came out, in order to _overcome his thoughts, and maintain them in a
line contrary to that which his passions demanded_? When, grieved,
calumniated, outraged, he _preferred exile rather than yi