[Footnote 1: We have seen how often, in his Journals and Letters, this suspicion of his own mental soundness is intimated. A similar notion, with respect to himself, seems to have taken hold also of the strong mind of Johnson, who, like Byron, too, was disposed to attribute to an hereditary tinge that melancholy which, as he said, "made him mad all his life, at least not sober." This peculiar feature of Johnson's mind has, in the late new edition of Boswell's Life of him, given rise to some remarks, pregnant with all the editor's well known acuteness, which, as bearing on a point so important in the history of the human intellect, will be found worthy of all attention. In one of the many letters of Lord Byron to myself, which I have thought right to omit, I find him tracing this supposed disturbance of his own faculties to the marriage of Miss Chaworth;--"a marriage," he says, "for which she sacrificed the prospects of two very ancient families, and a heart which was hers from ten years old, and a head which has never been quite right since."] [Footnote 2: In his Diary of 1814 there is a passage (vol. ii. page 270.) which I had preserved solely for the purpose of illustrating this obliquity of his mind, intending, at the same time, to accompany it with an explanatory note. From some inadvertence, however, the note was omitted; and, thus left to itself, this piece of mystification has, with the French readers of the work, I see, succeeded most perfectly; there being no imaginable variety of murder which the votaries of the new romantic school have not been busily extracting out of the mystery of that passage.] This strange propensity with which the man was, as it were, inoculated by the poet, re-acted back again upon his poetry, so as to produce, in some of his delineations of character, that inconsistency which has not unfrequently been noticed by his critics,--namely, the junction of one or two lofty and shining virtues with "a thousand crimes" altogether incompatible with them; this anomaly being, in fact, accounted for by the two different sorts of ambition that actuated him,--the natural one, of infusing into his personages those high and kindly qualities he felt conscious of within himself, and the artificial one, of investing them with those crimes which he so boyishly wished imputed to him by the world.