"'Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign Of human frailty, folly, also crime, That love and marriage rarely can combine. Although they both are born in the same clime; Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine-- A sad, sour, sober beverage.[224]... An honest gentleman, at his return, May not have the good fortune of Ulysses;... The odds are that he finds a handsome urn To his memory--and two or three young misses Born to some friend, who holds his wife and riches-- And that his Argus bites him by--the breeches."[225] These are the words of a sceptic, even of a cynic. Sceptic and cynic, it is in this he ends. Sceptic through misanthropy, cynic through bravado, a sad and combative humor always impels him; southern voluptuousness has not conquered him; he is only an epicurean through contradiction and for a moment: "Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication."[226] We see clearly that he is always the same, going to extremes and unhappy, bent on destroying himself. His "Don Juan," also, is a debauchery; in it he diverts himself outrageously at the expense of all respectable things, as a bull in a china shop. He is always violent, and often ferocious; a sombre imagination intersperses his love stories with horrors leisurely enjoyed, the despair and famine of shipwrecked men, and the emaciation of the raging skeletons feeding on each other. He laughs at it horribly, like Swift; he jests over it like Voltaire: "And next they thought upon the master's mate, As fattest; but he saved himself, because, Besides being much averse from such a fate, There were some other reasons: the first was, He had been rather indisposed of late; And that which chiefly proved his saving clause, Was a small present made to him at Cadiz, By general subscription of the ladies."[227] With his specimens in hand,[228] Byron follows with a surgeon's exactness all the stages of death, gorging, rage, madness, howling, exhaustion, stupor; he wishes to touch and exhibit the naked and ascertained truth, the last grotesque and hideous element of humanity. Let us read again the assault on Ismail--the grape-shot and the bayonet, the street massacres, the corpses used as fascines, and the thirty-eight thousand slaughtered Turks. There is blood enough to satiate a tiger, and this blood flows amidst an accompaniment of jests; it is in order to rail at war, and the butcheries dignified with the name of exploits. In this pitiless and universal demolition of all human vanities, what remains? What do we know except that life is a "scene of all-confess'd inanity," and that men are, "Dogs, or men!--for I flatter you in saying That ye are dogs--your betters far--ye may Read, or read not, what I am now essaying To show ye what ye are in every way?"[229]