[Footnote 76: This plan (which he never put in practice) had been talked of by him before he left Southwell, and is thus noticed in a letter of his fair correspondent to her brother:--"How can you ask if Lord B. is going to visit the Highlands in the summer? Why, don't _you_ know that he never knows his own mind for ten minutes together? I tell _him_ he is as fickle as the winds, and as uncertain as the waves."] [Footnote 77: We observe here, as in other parts of his early letters, that sort of display and boast of rakishness which is but too common a folly at this period of life, when the young aspirant to manhood persuades himself that to be profligate is to be manly. Unluckily, this boyish desire of being thought worse than he really was, remained with Lord Byron, as did some other feelings and foibles of his boyhood, long after the period when, with others, they are past and forgotten; and his mind, indeed, was but beginning to outgrow them, when he was snatched away.] [Footnote 78: The poem afterwards enlarged and published under the title of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." It appears from this that the ground-work of that satire had been laid some time before the appearance of the article in the Edinburgh Review.] [Footnote 79: Sept. 1807. This Review, in pronouncing upon the young author's future career, showed itself somewhat more "prophet-like" than the great oracle of the North. In noticing the Elegy on Newstead Abbey, the writer says, "We could not but hail, with something of prophetic rapture, the hope conveyed in the closing stanza:-- "Haply thy sun, emerging, yet may shine, Thee to irradiate with meridian ray," &c. &c. ] [Footnote 80: The first number of a monthly publication called "The Satirist," in which there appeared afterwards some low and personal attacks upon him.] [Footnote 81: "Look out for a people entirely destitute of religion: if you find them at all, be assured that they are but few degrees removed from brutes."--HUME. The reader will find this avowal of Hume turned eloquently to the advantage of religion in a Collection of Sermons, entitled, "The Connexion of Christianity with Human Happiness," written by one of Lord Byron's earliest and most valued friends, the Rev. William Harness.] [Footnote 82: The only thing remarkable about Walsh's preface is, that Dr. Johnson praises it as "very judicious," but is, at the same time, silent respecting the poems to which it is prefixed.] [Footnote 83: Characters in the novel called _Percival_.] [Footnote 84: This appeal to the imagination of his correspondent was not altogether without effect.--"I considered," says Mr. Dallas, "these letters, _though evidently grounded on some occurrences in the still earlier part of his life_, rather as _jeux d'esprit_ than as a true portrait."]