Independently, however, of any such efforts towards blackening his own name, and even after he had learned from bitter experience the rash folly of such a system, there was still, in the openness and over-frankness of his nature, and that indulgence of impulse with which he gave utterance to, if not acted upon, every chance impression of the moment, more than sufficient to bring his character, in all its least favourable lights, before the world. Who is there, indeed, that could bear to be judged by even the best of those unnumbered thoughts that course each other, like waves of the sea, through our minds, passing away unuttered, and, for the most part, even unowned by ourselves?--Yet to such a test was Byron's character throughout his whole life exposed. As well from the precipitance with which he gave way to every impulse as from the passion he had for recording his own impressions, all those heterogeneous thoughts, fantasies, and desires that, in other men's minds, "come like shadows, so depart," were by him fixed and embodied as they presented themselves, and, at once, taking a shape cognizable by public opinion, either in his actions or his words, either in the hasty letter of the moment, or the poem for all time, laid open such a range of vulnerable points before his judges, as no one individual perhaps ever before, of himself, presented. With such abundance and variety of materials for portraiture, it may easily be conceived how two professed delineators of his character, the one over partial and the other malicious, might,--the former, by selecting only the fairer, and the latter only the darker, features,--produce two portraits of Lord Byron, as much differing from each other as they would both be, on the whole, unlike the original. Of the utter powerlessness of retention with which he promulgated his every thought and feeling,--more especially if at all connected with the subject of self,--without allowing even a pause for the almost instinctive consideration whether by such disclosures he might not be conveying a calumnious impression of himself, a stronger instance could hardly be given than is to be found in a conversation held by him with Mr. Trelawney, as reported by this latter gentleman, when they were on their way together to Greece. After some remarks on the state of his own health[1], mental and bodily, he said, "I don't know how it is, but I am so cowardly at times, that if, this morning, you had come down and horsewhipped me, I should have submitted without opposition. Why is this? If one of these fits come over me when we are in Greece, what shall I do?"--"I told him (continues Mr. Trelawney) that it was the excessive debility of his nerves. He said, 'Yes, and of my head, too. I was very heroic when I left Genoa, but, like Acres, I feel my courage oozing out at my palms.'"