different, in
all the circumstances connected with them, were the two periods at which
these records of his passing thoughts were traced. The first he wrote at
a time which may be considered, to use his own words, as "the most
poetical part of his whole life,"--_not_ certainly, in what regarded the
powers of his genius, to which every succeeding year added new force and
range, but in all that may be said to constitute the poetry of
character,--those fresh, unworldly feelings of which, in spite of his
early plunge into experience, he still retained the gloss, and that
ennobling light of imagination, which, with all his professed scorn of
mankind, still followed in the track of his affections, giving a lustre
to every object on which they rested. There was, indeed, in his
misanthropy, as in his sorrows, at that period, to the full as much of
fancy as of reality; and even those gallantries and loves in which he at
the same time entangled himself partook equally, as I have endeavoured
to show, of the same imaginative character. Though brought early under
the dominion of the senses, he had been also early rescued from this
thraldom by, in the first place, the satiety such excesses never fail to
produce, and, at no long interval after, by this series of half-fanciful
attachments which, though in their moral consequences to society,
perhaps, still more mischievous, had the varnish at least of refinement
on the surface, and by the novelty and apparent difficulty that invested
them served to keep alive that illusion of imagination from which such
pursuits derive their sole redeeming charm.

With such a mixture, or rather predominance, of the ideal in his loves,
his hates, and his sorrows, the state of his existence at that period,
animated as it was, and kept buoyant, by such a flow of success, must be
acknowledged, even with every deduction for the unpicturesque
associations of a London life, to have been, in a high degree, poetical,
and to have worn round it altogether a sort of halo of romance, which
the events that followed were but too much calculated to dissipate. By
his marriage, and its results, he was again brought back to some of
those bitter realities of which his youth had had a foretaste. Pecuniary
embarrassment--that ordeal, of all others, the most trying to delicacy
and high-mindedness--now beset him with all the indignities that usually
follow in its train; and he was thus rudely schooled into the advantages
of