sulphurous cracks, but which they none the less stand ready to worship as
a genuine article that 'fell down from Jupiter.'

Moore was a man of no particular nicety as to moralities, but in that
matter seems not very much below what this record shows his average
associates to be. He is so far superior to Maginn, that his vice is rose-
coloured and refined. He does not burst out with such heroic stanzas as
Maginn's frank invitation to Jeremy Bentham:--

'Jeremy, throw your pen aside,
And come get drunk with me;
And we'll go where Bacchus sits astride,
Perched high on barrels three.'

Moore's vice is cautious, soft, seductive, slippery, and covered at times
with a thin, tremulous veil of religious sentimentalism.

In regard to Byron, he was an unscrupulous, committed partisan: he was as
much bewitched by him as ever man has been by woman; and therefore to
him, at last, the task of editing Byron's 'Memoirs' was given.

This Byron, whom they all knew to be obscene beyond what even their most
drunken tolerance could at first endure; this man, whose foul license
spoke out what most men conceal from mere respect to the decent instincts
of humanity; whose 'honour was lost,'--was submitted to this careful
manipulator, to be turned out a perfected idol for a world longing for an
idol, as the Israelites longed for the calf in Horeb.

The image was to be invested with deceitful glories and shifting
haloes,--admitted faults spoken of as peculiarities of sacred origin,--and