had done him. For a time, the kindly sentiments which he still harboured
towards Lady Byron, and a sort of vague hope, perhaps, that all would
yet come right again, kept his mind in a mood somewhat more softened and
docile, as well as sufficiently under the influence of English opinion
to prevent his breaking out into such open rebellion against it, as he
unluckily did afterwards.

By the failure of the attempted mediation with Lady Byron, his last link
with home was severed; while, notwithstanding the quiet and unobtrusive
life which he had led at Geneva, there was as yet, he found, no
cessation of the slanderous warfare against his character;--the same
busy and misrepresenting spirit which had tracked his every step at home
having, with no less malicious watchfulness, dogged him into exile. To
this persuasion, for which he had but too much grounds, was added all
that an imagination like his could lend to truth,--all that he was left
to interpret, in his own way, of the absent and the silent,--till, at
length, arming himself against fancied enemies and wrongs, and, with the
condition (as it seemed to him) of an outlaw, assuming also the
desperation, he resolved, as his countrymen would not do justice to the
better parts of his nature, to have, at least, the perverse satisfaction
of braving and shocking them with the worst. It is to this feeling, I am
convinced, far more than to any depraved taste for such a course of
life, that the extravagances to which he now, for a short time, gave
loose, are to be attributed. The exciting effect, indeed, of this mode
of existence while it lasted, both upon his spirits and his genius,--so
like what, as he himself tells us, was always produced in him by a state
of contest and defiance,--showed how much of this latter feeling must
have been mixed with his excesses. The altered character too, of his
letters in this respect cannot fail, I think, to be remarked by the
reader,--there being, with an evident increase of intellectual vigour, a