together. The only pleasure of fame is that it paves the way to
pleasure; and the more intellectual our pleasure, the better for the
pleasure and for us too."[86]

This modesty sometimes even carried him so far as to lead him into most
extraordinary appreciation of things. For instance, he almost thought it
blamable to have one's own bust done in marble, unless it were for the
sake of a friend. Apropos of a young American who came to see him at
Ravenna, and who told him he was commissioned by Thorwaldsen to have a
copy of his bust made and sent to America, Lord Byron wrote in his
journal:--

"_I_ would not pay the price of a Thorwaldsen bust for any human head
and shoulders, except Napoleon's, or my children's or some _absurd
womankind's_, as Monkbarns calls them, or my sister's. If asked why,
then, I sat for my own? Answer, that it was at the particular request of
J.C. Hobhouse, Esq., and for no one else. A picture is a different
matter; every body sits for their picture; but a bust looks like putting
up _pretensions to permanency_, and smacks something of a _hankering for
public fame rather than private remembrance_."

Let us add to all these proofs of Lord Byron's modesty, that his great
experience of men and things, the doubts inseparable from deep learning,
and his indulgence for human weakness, rendered his reason most tolerant
in its exigencies, and that he never endeavored to impose his opinions
on others. But while remaining essentially a modest genius, Lord Byron
did not, however, ignore his own value. If he had doubted himself, if he
had wanted a just measure of confidence in his genius, could he have
found in his soul the energy necessary for accomplishing in a few years
such a marvellous literary career? His modesty did not proceed from
conscious inferiority with regard to others.

Could the intellect that caused him to appreciate others so well fail to
make him feel his own great superiority? But that _relative superiority_
which he felt in himself left him _perfectly modest_, or he knew it was
subject to other relations that showed it to him in extreme littleness:
that is to say, the relation of the finite with the aspiration toward
the infinite. It was the appreciation of the immense distance existing
between what we know and what we ignore, between what we are and what we
would be; the consciousness, in fact, of the limits imposed by God on
man, and which neither study nor excellence of faculties ca