This laughter,--which, in such temperaments, is the near neighbour of
tears,--served as a diversion to him from more painful vents of
bitterness; and the same philosophical calculation which made the poet
of melancholy, Young, declare that "he preferred laughing at the world
to being angry with it," led Lord Byron also to settle upon the same
conclusion; and to feel, in the misanthropic views he was inclined to
take of mankind, that mirth often saved him the pain of hate.

That, with so many drawbacks upon all generous effusions of sentiment,
he should still have preserved so much of his native tenderness and
ardour as is conspicuous, through all disguises, in his unquestionable
love for Madame Guiccioli, and in the still more undoubted zeal with
which he now entered, heart and soul, into the great cause of human
freedom, wheresoever or by whomsoever asserted[18],--only shows how rich
must have been the original stores of sensibility and enthusiasm which
even a career such as his could so little chill or exhaust. Most
consoling, too, is it to reflect that the few latter years of his life
should have been thus visited with a return of that poetic lustre,
which, though it never had ceased to surround the bard, had but too much
faded away from the character of the man; and that while
Love,--reprehensible as it was, but still Love,--had the credit of
rescuing him from the only errors that disgraced his maturer years, for
Liberty was reserved the proud but mournful triumph of calling the last
stage of his glorious course her own, and lighting him, amidst the
sympathies of the world, to his grave.

Having endeavoured, in this comparison between his present and former
self, to account, by what I consider to be their true causes, for the
new phenomena which his character, at this period, exhibited, I shall
now lay before the reader the Journal by which these remarks were more