of bearing rancor, rose also, and, going
straight to the colonel, said: "Give me your honest hand, and
good-night." The night would not have passed tranquilly for Lord Byron
without this reconciliation.

Among numerous proofs of this generous spirit of forgiveness,--so
numerous that choice is difficult--we shall select his behavior toward a
certain Mr. Scott, who, at the time of his separation, had attacked him
in a savage, cruel manner,--not only unjustly, but even without any
provocation.

"I beg to call particular attention," says Moore, "to the extract about
to follow.

"Those who at all remember the peculiar bitterness and violence, with
which Mr. Scott had assailed Lord Byron, at a crisis when both his heart
and fame were most vulnerable, will, if I am not mistaken, feel a thrill
of pleasurable admiration, in reading these sentences, such as they were
penned by Lord Byron, for his own expressions can alone convey any
adequate notion of the proud, generous pleasure that must have been felt
in writing them:--

"'Poor Scott is no more! In the exercise of his vocation, he contrived,
at last, to make himself the subject of a coroner's inquest. But he died
like a brave man, and he lived an able one. I knew him personally,
though slightly; although several years my senior, we had been
school-fellows together, at the grammar-school of Aberdeen. He did not
behave to me quite handsomely, in his capacity of editor, a few years
ago, but he was under no obligation to behave otherwise. _The moment was
too tempting for many friends, and for all enemies._ At a time when all
my relations (save one) fell from me, like leaves from the tree in
autumn winds, and my few friends became still fewer,--when the whole
periodical press (I mean the daily and weekly, not the _literary_,
press) was let loose against me, in every shape of reproach, with the
two strange exceptions (from their usual opposition) of, "The Courier"
and "The Examiner,"--the paper of which Scott had the direction was
neither the last nor the least vituperative. Two years ago, I met him at
Venice, when he was bowed in grief, by the loss of his son, and had
known, by experience, the bitterness of domestic privation. He was then
earnest with me to return to England, and on my telling him, with a
smile, that he was once of a different opinion, he replied to me, "_that
he, and others, had been greatly misled; and that some pains, and rather
extraordinary means, had be