"I have been amused (said Byron) in reading 'Les Essais de Montaigne,' to find how severe he is on the sentiment of tristesse; we are always severe on that particular passion to which we are not addicted, and the French are exempt from this. Montaigne says, that the Italians were right in translating their word tristezza, which means tristesse, into malignité; and this (continued Byron) explains my méchanceté, for that I am subject to tristesse cannot be doubted; and if that means, as Le Sieur de Montaigne states, la malignité, this is the secret of all my evil doings, or evil imaginings, and probably is also the source of my inspiration." This idea appeared to amuse him very much, and he dwelt on it with apparent satisfaction, saying that it absolved him from a load of responsibility, as he considered himself, according to this, as no more accountable for the satires he might write or speak, than for his personal deformity. Nature, he said, had to answer for malignité as well as for deformity, she gave both, and the unfortunate persons on whom she bestowed them were not to be blamed for their effects. Byron said, that Montaigne was one of the French writers that amused him the most, as, independently of the quaintness with which he made his observations, a perusal of his works was like a repetition at school, they rubbed up the reader's classical knowledge. He added, that "Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy" was also excellent, from the quantity of desultory information it contained, and was a mine of knowledge that, though much worked, was inexhaustible. I told him that he seemed to think more highly of Montaigne than did some of his own countrymen; for that when Le Cardinal du Perron "appelloit les Essais de Montaigne le bréviaire des honnêtes gens; le célèbre Huet, évêque d'Avranche, les disoit celui des honnêtes paresseux et des ignorans, qui veulent s'enfariner de quelque teinture des lettres,"-Byron said that the critique was severe, but just; for that Montaigne was the greatest plagiarist that ever existed, and certainly had turned his reading to the most account. "But (said Byron) who is the author that is not, intentionally or unintentionally, a plagiarist? Many more, I am persuaded, are the latter than the former; and if one has read much, it is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid adopting, not only the thoughts, but the expressions of others, which, after they have been some time stored in our minds, appear to us to come forth ready formed, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, and we fancy them our own progeny, instead of being those of adoption. I met lately a passage in a French book (continued Byron) that states, à propos of plagiaries, that it was from the preface to the works of Montaigne, by Mademoiselle de Gournay, his adopted daughter, that Pascal stole his image of the Divinity :

C'est un cercle, dont la circonférence est par-tout, et le centre nulle part.' So you see that even the saintly Pascal could steal as well as another, and was probably unconscious of the theft.

"To be perfectly original, (continued Byron,) one should think much

and read little; and this is impossible, as one must have read much before one learns to think; for I have no faith in innate ideas, whatever I may have of innate predispositions. But after one has laid in a tole`rable stock of materials for thinking, I should think the best plan would be to give the mind time to digest it, and then turn it all well over by thought and reflection, by which we make the knowledge acquired our own; and on this foundation we may let our originality (if we have any) build a superstructure, and if not, it supplies our want of it, to a certain degree. I am accused of plagiary, (continued Byron,) as I see by the newspapers. If I am guilty, I have many partners in the crime; for I assure you I scarcely know a living author who might not have a similar charge brought against him, and whose thoughts I have not occasionally found in the works of others; so that this consoles me.

"The book you lent me, Dr. Richardson's Travels along the Mediterranean,' (said Byron,) is an excellent work. It abounds in information, sensibly and unaffectedly conveyed, and even without Lord B.'s praises of the author, would have led me to conclude that he was an enlightened, sensible, and thoroughly good man. He is always in earnest, (continued Byron,) and never writes for effect: his language is well chosen and correct; and his religious views unaffected and sincere without bigotry. He is just the sort of man I should like to have with me for Greece-clever, both as a man and a physician; for I require both-one for my mind, and the other for my body, which is a little the worse for wear, from the bad usage of the troublesome tenant that has inhabited it, God help me!

"It is strange (said Byron) how seldom one meets with clever, sensible men in the professions of divinity or physic; and yet they are precisely the professions that most peculiarly demand intelligence and ability, as to keep the soul and body in good health requires no ordinary talents. I have, I confess, as little faith in medicine as Napoleon had. I think it has many remedies, but few specifics. I do not know if we arrived at the same conclusion by the same road. Mine has been drawn from observing that the medical men who fell in my way were, in general, so deficient in ability, that even had the science of medicine been fifty times more simplified than it ever will be in our time, they had not intelligence enough to comprehend or reduce it to practice, which has given me a much greater dread of remedies than diseases. Medical men do not sufficiently attend to idiosyncrasy, (continued Byron,) on which so much depends, and often hurry to the grave one patient by a treatment that has succeeded with another. The moment they ascertain a disease to be the same as one they have known, they conclude the same remedies that cured the first must remove the second, not making allowance for the peculiarities of temperament, habits, and disposition, which last has a great influence in maladies. All that I have seen of physicians has given me a dread of them, which dread will

continue, until I have met a doctor like your friend Richardson, who proves himself to be a sensible and intelligent man. I maintain (continued Byron) that more than half our maladies are produced by accustoming ourselves to more sustenance than is required for the support of nature. We put too much oil into the lamp, and it blazes and burns out; but if we only put enough to feed the flame, it burns brightly and steadily. We have, God knows, sufficient alloy in our compositions, without reducing them still nearer to the brute by overfeeding. I think that one of the reasons why women are in general so much better than men, for I do think they are, whatever I may say to the contrary,→ (continued Byron,) is, that they do not indulge in gourmandise as men do; and, consequently, do not labour under the complicated horrors that indigestion produces, which has such a dreadful effect on the tempers, as I have both witnessed and felt.

"There is nothing I so much dread as flattery, (said Byron ;) not that I mean to say I dislike it,-for, on the contrary, if well administered, it is very agreeable, but I dread it because I know, from experience, we end by disliking those we flatter: it is the mode we take to avenge ourselves for stooping to the humiliation of flattering them. On this account, I never flatter those I really like; and, also, I should be fearful and jealous of owing their regard for me to the pleasure my flattery gave them. I am not so forbearing with those I am indifferent about; for seeing how much people like flattery, I cannot resist giving them some, and it amuses me to see how they swallow even the largest doses. Now, there is -; who could live on passable terms with them, that did not administer to their vanity? One tells you all his bonnes fortunes, and would never forgive you if you appeared to be surprised at their extent; and the other talks to you of prime ministers and dukes by their surnames, and cannot state the most simple fact or occurrence without telling you that Wellington or Devonshire told him so. One does not (continued Byron) meet this last foiblesse out of England, and not then, I must admit, except among parvenus.

and

"It is doubtful which, vanity or conceit, is the most offensive, (said Byron ;) but I think conceit is, because the gratification of vanity depends on the suffrages of others, to gain which vain people must endea vour to please; but as conceit is content with its own approbation, it makes no sacrifice, and is not susceptible of humiliation. I confess that I have a spiteful pleasure (continued Byron) in mortifying conceited people; and the gratification is enhanced by the difficulty of the task. One of the reasons why I dislike society is, that its contact excites all the evil qualities of my nature, which, like the fire in the flint, can only be elicited by friction. My philosophy is more theoretical than prac tical it is never at hand when I want it; and the puerile passions that I witness in those whom I encounter excite disgust when examined near, though, viewed at a distance, they only create pity,-that is to say, in

simple, homely truth, (continued Byron,) the follies of mankind, when they touch me not, I can be lenient to, and moralize on; but if they rub against my own, there is an end to the philosopher. We are all better in solitude, and more especially if we are tainted with evil passions, which, God help us! we all are, more or less, (said Byron.) They are not then brought into action: reason and reflection have time and opportunity to resume that influence over us which they rarely can do if we are actors in the busy scene of life; and we grow better, because we believe ourselves better. Our passions often only sleep when we suppose them dead; and we are not convinced of our mistake, till they awake with renewed strength, gained by repose. We are, therefore, wise when we choose solitude, where passions sleep and reason wakes;' for if we cannot conquer the evil qualities that adhere to our nature, we do well to encourage their slumber. Like cases of acute pain, when the physician cannot remove the malady he administers soporifics.

"When I recommend solitude, (said Byron,) I do not mean the solitude of country neighbourhood, where people pass their time à dire, redire, et médire. No! I mean a regular retirement, with a woman that one loves, and interrupted only by a correspondence with a man that one esteems, though if we put plural of man, it would be more agreeable for the correspondence. By this means, friendships would not be subject to the variations and estrangements that are so often caused by a frequent personal intercourse; and we might delude ourselves into a belief that they were sincere, and might be lasting-two difficult articles of faith in my creed of friendship. Socrates and Plato (continued Byron) ridiculed Laches, who defined fortitude to consist in remaining firm in the ranks opposed to the enemy; and I agree with those philosophers in thinking that a retreat is not inglorious, whether from the enemy in the field or in the town, if one feels one's own weakness, and anticipates a defeat. I feel that society is my enemy, in even more than a figurative sense: I have not fled, but retreated from it; and if solitude has not made me better, I am sure it has prevented my becoming worse, which is a point gained.

"Have you ever observed (said Byron) the extreme dread that parvenus have of aught that approaches to vulgarity? In manners, letters, conversation, nay, even in literature, they are always superfine; and a man of birth would unconsciously hazard a thousand dubious phrases, sooner than a parvenu would risk the possibility of being suspected of one. One of the many advantages of birth is, that it saves one from this hypercritical gentility, and he of noble blood may be natural without the fear of being accused of vulgarity. I have left an assembly filled with all the names of haut ton in London, and where little but names were to be found, to seek relief from the ennui that overpowered me, in a―cyder cellar-are you not shocked?—and have found there more food for speculation than in the vapid circles of glittering dulness I had left.

or dared not have done this, but I had the patent of nobility to carry me through it, and what would have been deemed originality and spirit in me, would have been considered a natural bias to vulgar habits in them. In my works, too, I have dared to pass the frozen mole hills— I cannot call them Alps, though they are frozen eminences-of high life, and have used common thoughts and common words to express my impressions; where poor would have clarified each thought, and doublerefined each sentence, until he had reduced them to the polished and cold temperature of the illuminated houses of ice that he loves to frequent; which have always reminded me of the palace of ice built to please an empress, cold, glittering, and costly. But I suppose that

and like them, from the same cause that I like high life below stairs, not being born to it-there is a good deal in this. I have been abused for dining at Tom Cribb's, where I certainly was amused, and have returned from a dinner where the guests were composed of the magnates of the land, where I had nigh gone to sleep-at least my intellect slumbered-so dullified was I and those around me, by the soporific quality of the conversation, if conversation it might be called. For a long time I thought it was my constitutional melancholy that made me think London society so insufferably tiresome; but I discovered that those who had no such malady found it equally so; the only difference was that they yawned under the nightly inflictions, yet still continued to bear them, while I writhed, and 'muttered curses not loud but deep' against the well-dressed automatons, that threw a spell over my faculties, making me doubt if I could any longer feel or think; and I have sought the solitude of my chamber, almost doubting my own identity, or, at least, my sanity, such was the overpowering effect produced on me by exclusive society in London. Madame de Staël was the only person of talent I ever knew who was not overcome by it; but this was owing to the constant state of excitement she was kept in by her extraordinary selfcomplacency, and the mystifications of the dandies, who made her believe all sorts of things. I have seen her entranced by them, listening with undisguised delight to exaggerated compliments, uttered only to hoax her, by persons incapable of appreciating her genius, and who doubted its existence from the facility with which she received mystifications which would have been detected in a moment by the most commonplace woman in the room. It is thus genius and talent are judged of (continued Byron) by those who, having neither, are incapable of understanding them; and a punster may glory in puzzling a genius of the first order, by a play on words that was below his comprehension, though suited to that of the most ordinary understandings. Madame de Staël had no tact; she would believe anything merely because she did not take the trouble to examine, being too much occupied with self, and often said the most mal à propos things, because she was thinking not of the person she addressed, but of herself. She had a party to dine with her one day in