[Vide Moore's "Life of Byron," in which it is satisfactorily shown that if a man fast forty-eight hours, then eat three lobsters, and drink Heaven knows how many bottles of claret; if, when he wake the next morning, he sees himself abused as a demon by half the periodicals of the country,--if, in a word, he be broken in his health, irregular in his habits, unfortunate in his affairs, unhappy in his home, and if then he should be so extremely eccentric as to be low-spirited and misanthropical, the low spirits and the misanthropy are by no means to be attributed to the above agreeable circumstances, but, God wot, to the "poetical character"!] "You jest pleasantly enough on your low spirits," said Clifford; "but I have a cause for mine." "What then?" cried Tomlinson. "So much the easier is it to cure them. The mind can cure the evils that spring from the mind. It is only a fool and a quack and a driveller when it professes to heal the evils that spring from the body. My blue devils spring from the body; consequently my mind, which, as you know, is a particularly wise mind, wrestles riot against them. Tell me frankly," renewed Augustus, after a pause, "do you ever repent? Do you ever think, if you had been a shop-boy with a white apron about your middle, that you would have been a happier and a better member of society than you now are?" "Repent!" said Clifford, fiercely; and his answer opened more of his secret heart, its motives, its reasonings, and its peculiarities than were often discernible,--"repent! that is the idlest word in our language. No; the moment I repent, that moment I reform! Never can it seem to me an atonement for crime merely to regret it. My mind would lead me, not to regret, but to repair! Repent! no, not yet. The older I grow, the more I see of men and of the callings of social life, the more I, an open knave, sicken at the glossed and covert dishonesties around. I acknowledge no allegiance to society. From my birth to this hour, I have received no single favour from its customs or its laws; openly I war against it, and patiently will I meet its revenge. This may be crime; but it looks light in my eyes when I gaze around, and survey on all sides the masked traitors who acknowledge large debts to society, who profess to obey its laws, adore its institutions, and, above all--oh, how righteously!--attack all those who attack it, and who yet lie and cheat and defraud and peculate,--publicly reaping all the comforts, privately filching all the profits. Repent!--of what? I come into the world friendless and poor; I find a body of laws hostile to the friendless and the poor! To those laws hostile to me, then, I acknowledge hostility in my turn. Between us are the conditions of war. Let them expose a weakness,--I insist on my right to seize the advantage; let them defeat me, and I allow their right to destroy."--[The author need not, he hopes,