He was one of those exceptional men who may do exceptional things with impunity--and also one of those self-willed men who, having made up their minds what is best, can never be contented with the second-best, but must always be kicking against the pricks. Hence the stormy emotional career through which we have followed him, and the many experiments, reckless but half-hearted, with new ways of life; a reckless but half-hearted marriage; reckless but half-hearted intrigues, first with the Drury Lane actresses, and then with the Venetian light-o'-loves; a reckless but half-hearted career as the _cicisbeo_ of an Italian nobleman's wife. Two thoughts had been present to his mind through all these phases: the thought in the first place that he owed it to himself to prove that he was a better and a greater man than he had seemed to be, and to redeem the mess which he had made of his life by some impressive action; the thought, in the second place, of Mary Chaworth. We have seen the former thought flashing out in a letter to Moore, who was probably one of the last men in the world capable of understanding it. The latter thought is blazoned in the letter written to Mary Chaworth in the midst of the Venetian revels, and so absurdly asserted by Lord Lovelace to be a letter to Augusta Leigh. It reappears, as we have seen, in the Detached Thoughts, and also in poem after poem, from "The Dream" to the piece just cited. Evidently, therefore, it was, indeed, the thought which Byron lived with--the thought which, if not always with him, was always waiting for him when the reaction following upon excitement made room for it. There would be no escape from it until the hour when, as he put it, he looked around, and chose his ground, and took his rest; and it only remains for us to picture the last stormy scenes at the end of which rest was reached. CHAPTER XXXII DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE The end was not to come, as Byron may have hoped, on the field of battle. It was his health, as he had apprehended (though without, for that reason, taking any special care of it) that was to fail him. An imprudent plunge into the winter sea while on his way to Missolonghi had upset him; and though he had temporarily recovered, he was in no state to resist the pestilential climate of that dismal swamp. He knew it, and at the very time when Stanhope was writing home that "Lord Byron burns with military ardour and chivalry," he was keenly conscious, as his own letters show, of the danger attending his residence in the most malarious quarter of a malarious town. "If we are not taken off by the sword," he wrote on February 5, "we are like to march off with an ague in this mud basket; and, to conclude with a bad grace better _marshally_ than _marti-ally_. The dykes of Holland, when broken down, are the deserts of Arabia in comparison with Missolonghi."