"My pretensions to virtue are unluckily so few, that though I should be happy to merit, I cannot accept your applause in that respect. One passage in your letter struck ine forcibly; you mention the two Lords Lyttleton in the manner they respectively deserve, and will be surprized to hear the person, who is now addressing you, has been frequently compared to the latter. I know I am injuring myself in your esteem by this avowal, but the circumstance was so remarkable from your observation, that I cannot help relating the fact. The events of my short life have been of so singular a nature, that, though the pride commonly called honour has, and I trust ever will, prevent me from disgracing my name by a mean or cowardly action, I have been already held up as the votary of licentiousness, and the

disciple of infidelity. How far justice may have dictated this accusation I cannot pretend to say, but, like the gentleman to whom my religious friends, in the warmth of their charity, have already devoted me, I am made worse than I really am."

The following is from a subsequent letter to Mr. Dallas.

"I once thought myself a philosopher, and talked nonsense with great decorum; I defied pain, and preached up equanimity. For some time this did very well, for no one was in pain for me but my friends, and none lost their patience but my hearers. At last, a fall from my horse convinced me that bodily suffering was an evil; and the worst of an argument overset my maxims and my temper at the same moment, so I quitted Zeno for Aristippus, and conceive that

pleasure constitutes the το καλον. In morality, I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments, and Socrates to St. Paul, though the two latter agree in their opinion of marriage. In religion, I favor the Catholic emancipation, but do not acknowledge the pope; and I have refused to take the sacrament, because I do not think eating bread or drinking wine from the hand of an earthly vicar will make me an inheritor of heaven. I hold virtue in general, or the virtues severally, to be only in the disposition, each a feeling, not a principle. I believe truth the prime attribute of the Deity; and death an eternal sleep, at least of the body. You have here a brief compendium of the sentiments of the wicked George Lord Byron; and, till I get a new suit, you will perceive I am badly clothed."

While at the University, he became intimate with one, whom he thus celebrates in the concluding note to the first canto of Childe Harold.

"I should have ventured a verse to the memory of the late Charles Skinner Matthews. Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, were he not too much above all praise of mine. His powers of mind, shown in the attainment of greater honours, against the ablest candidates, than those of any graduate on record at Cambridge, have sufficiently established his fame on the spot where it was acquired, while his softer qualities live in the recollection of friends, who loved him too well to envy his superiority."..

Of Mr. Matthews, however, he speaks in the following terms in a letter to Mr.Dallas! You did not know M**; he was a

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man of the most astonishing powers, as he sufficiently proved at Cambridge, by carrying off more prizes and fellowships, against the ablest candidates, than any other graduate on record; but a most decided atheist, indeed, noxiously so, for he proclaimed his principles in all societies."

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Lord Byron early experienced some of those consequences, which a mind of much feeling, and of much compass of thought, must suffer from the opinions he had adopted, and the course of conduct he pursued; satiety, loathing of the world, remorse, and misanthropy. He formed friendships with the worthless, and finding them worthless, in his disappointment and despite, he denied the existence of all disinterested feeling. His most craving passion was the desire of fixing upon himself

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