made of his testimony when he speaks
against himself. For instance, he has called himself irritable and prone
to anger, and biographers have found it very convenient to paint him
with his own brush. Men never fail to treat those who depreciate
themselves with equal injustice. Nor is this surprising. If it be true
that we are always judged on our faulty side, even though we endeavor to
show the best, what must be the case if our efforts tend only to display
our worst? And besides, why should others give themselves the trouble of
exonerating a man from blame who depreciated himself? As it requires
great discernment, great generosity, and very rare qualities, not to go
beyond truth in self-esteem, biographers have not hesitated to declare
Lord Byron, on his own testimony, _very irritable_, and even very
passionate; but was he really so? This is a question to be examined.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 98: Moore's "Life," vol. iv. p. 241.]

[Footnote 99: Parry, 273.]

[Footnote 100: Letter from Finlay to Stanhope, Parry, 210.]

[Footnote 101: Parry, 210.]

[Footnote 102: Moore, 214, vol. ii. in 4to.]

[Footnote 103: Montaigne, vol. iii. p. 87.]

[Footnote 104: "Journal of Conversation," p. 195.]

[Footnote 105: See chapter on Lord Byron's biographers.]

CHAPTER XVII.

IRRITABILITY OF LORD BYRON.

Was Lord Byron irritable? With his poetic temperament, his exquisite and
almost morbid sensibility, so grievously tried by circumstances, it
would be equally absurd and untrue to pretend that he was as impassible
as a stoic, or phlegmatic as some good citizen who vegetates rather than
lives. Did such qualities, or rather faults,--for they betoken a cold
nature,--ever belong to Milton, Dante, Alfieri, and those master-spirits
whose strength of passion, combined with force of intellect, have
merited for them the rank of geniuses?

All more or less were, and could not fail to have been, susceptible of
irritation and anger; for such susceptibility was indispensable in the
peculiar constitution of their minds. But he who finds sufficient
strength of will to control himself, when over-excitement is caused by
some wounded feeling, does not that person approach to virtue? Did Lord
Byron possess this power? Every thing, even to the testimony of his
servants, his masters, his comrades, proves that he did. In childhood he
showed that he knew how to conquer himself, and would use his power. He
says, himself, that his anger was