The author of an "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard"[139] was absolutely a slave to diffidence and painful shyness,--a characteristic which led to bitter persecution while he was a young student; nor could he ever quite divest himself of this nervous timidity. Hazlitt says of Gray that "he was terrified out of his wits at the bare idea of having his portrait prefixed to his works, and probably died from nervous agitation at the publicity into which his name had been forced by his learning, taste, and genius." On the death of Cibber, the vacant laureateship was offered to Gray, but his sensitiveness led him to decline it.[140] CHAPTER VII. In these desultory chapters we have more than once seen that fame appeals to posterity; but in the instance of Byron it was contemporary, for he tells us he "awoke one morning and found himself famous." No man's errors were ever more closely observed and recorded than his; and we are still too near the period of his life to forget his foibles and remember only the productions of his genius. Byron, like Pope, was a sufferer from physical deformity, and much of the morbid sensibility of both arose from their common misfortune. Macaulay, speaking of Byron, says: "He had naturally a generous and feeling heart, but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggar in the street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the finest and most judicious training. But capriciously as Nature had dealt with him, the parent to whom the office of forming his character was intrusted was more capricious still. She passed from paroxysms of rage to paroxysms of tenderness. At one time she stiffled him with her caresses; at another time she insulted his deformity. He came into the world; and the world treated him as his mother had treated him,--sometimes with fondness, sometimes with cruelty, never with justice. It indulged him without discrimination, and punished him without discrimination. He was truly a spoiled child,--the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society." The author of "Don Juan" was actuated at times by a strange recklessness, and a desire to seem worse than he really was. He aped the misanthrope, assumed unfelt remorse, and affected singularity, in order to court notoriety. However capricious may have been his temper, he came rightly enough by it, since his mother was noted for the frenzied violence of her passion, being wholly without judgment or self-control, and in nearly every respect disqualified for performing a parent's duty.[141] Byron was also a victim of hypochondria only in a less degree than Johnson and Cowley; and this is his one genuine excuse for the excesses into which he sometimes rushed headlong.