of all the numerous quacks whom his
celebrity and sociability drew around him."

In the first satire he gave to the world, and which attracted sympathy
for his talent as well as for the justice of his cause, the horror he
entertained of hypocrisy already made him speak against himself:--

"E'en I--least thinking of a thoughtless throng,
Just skill'd to know the right and choose the wrong."

After having quoted an early poem of Lord Byron, written in an hour of
great depression, and which would seem, inspired by momentary madness,
Moore makes the following declaration:--

"These concluding lines are of a nature, it must be owned, to awaken
more of horror than of interest, were we not prepared, by so many
instances of his exaggeration in this respect, not to be startled at any
lengths to which the spirit of _self-libelling_ would carry him. It
seemed as if, with the power of painting fierce and gloomy personages,
he had also the ambition to be himself the dark 'sublime he drew,' and
that, in his fondness for the delineation of heroic crime, he endeavored
to fancy, where he could not find in his own character, fit subjects for
his pencil."

Moore, mentioning another article in his memoranda, where Lord Byron
accuses himself of irritability of temperament in his early youth,
follows up with this reflection:--

"In all his portraits of himself, the pencil he uses is so dark that the
picture of his temperament and his self-attempts, covering as they do
with _a dark shadow the shade itself_, must be taken with large
allowance for exaggeration."

In another passage of his work, Moore further says:--

"To the perverse fancy he had for falsifying his own character, and even
imputing to himself faults the most alien to his nature, I have already
frequently adverted. I had another striking instance of it one day at La
Mira."

Moore then relates that, on leaving Venice, he went to La Mira to bid
Lord Byron farewell. Passing through the hall, he saw the little
Allegra, who had just returned from a walk. Moore made some remark on
the beauty of the child, and Byron answered, "Have you any notion--but I
suppose you have--of what they call the parental feeling? For myself, I
have not the least." And yet, when that child died, in a year or two
afterward, he who had uttered this artificial speech was so overwhelmed
by the event, that those who were about him at the time actually
trembled for his reason.[98]

Colonel Stanho