al, or whether they did not rather spring from
some noble cause; whether they were not rather the generous explosions
of a soul burning with indignation at evil and injustice, because it
ever held in view the contrast afforded by an ideal of its own that was
only too perfect?

It is impossible, for instance, not to see that his pen was guided by
one of these generous impulses when he spoke of Lord Castlereagh. He
had no personal, malevolent, interested antipathy toward this gay and
fashionable nobleman. His pen was inspired simply by his conscience,
that revolted at sight of the evils which he attributed to Lord
Castlereagh's policy. It was not the colleague, but the minister, that
he wished to stigmatize together with his policy, which appeared to Lord
Byron inhuman, selfish, and unjust. It was this same policy that caused
Pitt to say:--

"If we were just for one hour, we should not live a day." And
again:--"Perish every principle rather than England!"

What other statesman did Lord Byron attack except Castlereagh? But him
he did detest with a noble hatred.

"By what right do you attack Lord C----?" he was asked.

"By the right," he replied, "that every honest man has to denounce the
minister who ruins his country, and treads under foot every sentiment of
equity and humanity."

A few days before setting out on his last journey to Greece, he said to
an English lady passing through Genoa:--

"With regard to Lord Castlereagh personally, whom you hear that I have
attacked, I can only say that a bad minister's memory is as much an
object of investigation as his conduct while alive. He is a matter of
history; and wherever I find a tyrant or a _villain_, I will mark him. I
attacked him no more than I had the right to do, and than was necessary.

"Do not defend me, you will only make yourself enemies--mine are neither
to be diminished nor softened."

When Lord Byron wrote about Lord Castlereagh, imagination beheld in him
the author of all the evils inflicted on Ireland, the man who through a
selfish feeling of nationality, dangerous even to England, had riveted
the chains of all Europe.

"If he spoke and wrote thus of Lord Castlereagh," says Kennedy himself,
"the reason was that he really thought him an enemy to the true
interests of his country; and this sentiment, carried perhaps to excess,
made him consider it just to condemn him to the execration of
humanity."[112]

What I have said with regard to his attacks