rom the truthful conversations
of Mr. Kennedy:--

"Even during his last days on earth, he calumniated himself. For
instance, he told me, that at a certain hour, every evening, he had
intolerable fits of ill-humor. Well, Mr. Finlay and M---- always went to
see him precisely at that fatal hour, and they invariably found him gay,
pleasant, and amiable, as usual."

Mr. Finlay, a young English officer of merit and high intelligence, whom
Lord Byron thought very like Shelley, which, perhaps, increased his
sympathy for him, and who only knew him two months before his death,
says, in a letter written on Lord Byron to Colonel Stanhope:--

"What astonished me most was the indifference with which Lord Byron
spoke to us of all the lying reports his enemies spread against him. He
gave his vindication and explanation with as much calm frankness as if
it had concerned another person."

And he declares his astonishment at seeing him submit to the lessons of
morality, and the censures on his opinions and principles which Kennedy,
in his extreme orthodoxy, made him undergo.[110]

I will also add, that Lord Byron was often heard to say that he had been
in a frightful rage with his servants; but, if they were questioned,
_they knew nothing at all about it_. It is known, moreover, that his
toleration and gentleness with them almost exceeded due bounds, and
that, even when he had serious cause for chiding them, his severest
reprimands were conveyed in jests and pleasantries.

Persons who will not change their convictions, go so far as to
say,--"Well, be it so. We admit that he may have been calumniated in his
private life, and that his strange fancy of speaking against himself may
have contributed toward it. But how do you explain the anger expressed
by his pen? Do you forget his misanthropical invectives, his personal
attacks, his 'Avatar,' his epigrams?"

And I answer them:--"Do you forget that there are different kinds of
anger? some that can never be vicious, and others that can never be
virtuous? The anger expressed by his pen--the sole kind that was real
with him--requires to be explained, not excused or forgotten."

"Let us beware," says a great contemporary philosopher, "of him who is
never irritated, and can not understand the existence of a noble
anger."[111]

Be so good as to examine, without preconceived opinions, and without
prejudice, the nature of every kind of anger he displayed; see if any
were personal, egotistic