less, perhaps, from the love which he felt at that moment, than from the
saddening consciousness how differently he could have felt formerly. It
was, indeed, wholly beyond the power, even of an imagination like his,
to go on investing with its own ideal glories a sentiment which,--more
from daring and vanity than from any other impulse,--he had taken such
pains to tarnish and debase in his own eyes. Accordingly, instead of
being able, as once, to elevate and embellish all that interested him,
to make an idol of every passing creature of his fancy, and mistake the
form of love, which he so often conjured up, for its substance, he now
degenerated into the wholly opposite and perverse error of depreciating
and making light of what, intrinsically, he valued, and, as the reader
has seen, throwing slight and mockery upon a tie in which it was evident
some of the best feelings of his nature were wrapped up. That foe to all
enthusiasm and romance, the habit of ridicule, had, in proportion as he
exchanged the illusions for the realities of life, gained further empire
over him; and how far it had, at this time, encroached upon the loftier
and fairer regions of his mind may be seen in the pages of Don
Juan,--that diversified arena, on which the two Genii, good and evil,
that governed his thoughts, hold, with alternate triumph, their
ever-powerful combat.

Even this, too, this vein of mockery,--in the excess to which, at last,
he carried it,--was but another result of the shock his proud mind had
received from those events that had cast him off, branded and
heart-stricken, from country and from home. As he himself touchingly
says,

"And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep."