It might almost be said that he was quite the opposite of what a Saxon should be. Lord Byron could not remain, and, actually, lived a very short time, in England. His habits were not English, nor his mode of living. Far from over-eating, as the English, according to M. Taine, are said to do, Byron did not eat enough. He was as sober as a monk. His favorite food was vegetables. His abstinence from meat dated from his youth. His body was little adapted to the material wants of his country. This remarkable sobriety was the effect of taste and principle, and was in no ways broken by excesses which might have acted as compensations. The excesses of which M. Taine speaks must have been at the utmost some slight deviations from the real Pythagorean abstinence which he had laid down as the rule of his life. Abroad, where he lived almost all his life, he had none of the habits of his countrymen. He lived everywhere as a cosmopolitan. All that his body craved for was cleanliness, and this only served to improve his health and the marvellous beauty with which God had gifted him. Lord Byron was so little partial to the characteristic features and customs of the country in which he was born--"but where he would not die"--that the then so susceptible _amour-propre_ of his countrymen reproached him with it as a most unpardonable fault. It was not he who would have placed England and the English above all foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular; nor was it he who would have declared them to be the princes of the human race. Justice and truth forbade his committing himself to such statements in the name of national pride. Are the animal rather than moral, and moral rather than intellectual instincts of energy and will, which M. Taine so much admires in the Saxon race, defects or qualities in his eyes? It is difficult to say, for one never knows when he is praising or when he is condemning. Judging by the very material causes from which he derives this energy,--namely, the constitution of the people, their climate, their frequent craving for food, their way of cooking the food they eat, their drinks, and all the consequences of these necessities visible in the absence of all sense of delicacy, of all appreciation of the fine arts, and the comprehension of philosophy,--he must evidently intend to depreciate them. But as regards Lord Byron in particular, it is equally certain that he has no intention of depreciating him. For him alone he finds expressions of great admiration and real sympathy. He allows him to represent the whole nation, and to be the incarnation of the English character; but on one condition,--that of ruling it as its sovereign. Thanks to this supremacy, the poet escapes more or less the exigencies of M. Taine's theories.