darksome
conspiracies, forming a labyrinth of calumny, whence the purest
innocence has no escape; and he felt that justice violated in the person
of his friends, by a man unworthy of respect, required him, in justice,
to brand the individual. And rightly did he so with his words of fire.
When Ireland, that he would fain have seen heroic under misfortune,
degraded herself by her conduct toward this minister and the king, on
the occasion of their visit, he, touched with noble indignation,
resolved to punish and warn her; and his "Avatar" expressed these fine
sentiments. When the prince regent, after having shown himself a Liberal
and a Whig, denied his part, betrayed his party, and leagued with the
Tories, Lord Byron's noble indignation burst forth in his verses, and,
whenever occasion offered, he stigmatized such unworthy conduct.

And a proof that it was the conduct of the individual, and not personal
animosity, that guided his pen, may be found in the fact that a single
ray of hope of seeing this moral deformity transformed into beauty,
sufficed to make him change his tone immediately. When he learned the
pardon that had just been granted by George the Fourth to the guilty
Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he forgot all past offenses; his soul expanded
to admiration and hope; and he composed that beautiful sonnet, which so
well reveals the aspirations of his great heart:--

"To be the father of the fatherless,
To stretch the hand from the throne's height, and raise
_His_ offspring, who expired in other days
To make thy sire's sway by a kingdom less,--
_This_ is to be a monarch, and repress
Envy into unutterable praise.
Dismiss thy guard, and trust thee to such traits,
For who would lift a hand except to bless?
Were it not easy, sir, and is't not sweet
To make thyself beloved? and to be
Omnipotent by mercy's means? for thus
Thy sovereignty would grow but more complete:
A despot thou, and yet thy people free,
And by the heart, not hand, enslaving us."

_Bologna, August 12, 1819._

And then, as if poetry did not suffice, he adds these lines in prose:--

"So the prince has annulled Lord E. Fitzgerald's condemnation. He
deserves all praise, bad and good: it was truly a princely act."

All Lord Byron's expressions of indignation that have been attributed to
anger, belong really to his disinterested, heroic, generous nature. We
may convince ourselves of this by f