No intelligence, however favoured it be, but has its susceptibilities, its distrusts: one wishes to keep the sceptre, fears to share it, resents comparisons. In the same way, another superior talent has avoided the mention of my name in a work on Literature[319]. Thank God, rating myself at my just value, I have never aimed at empire; since I believe in nothing except the religious truth, of which liberty is a form, I have no more faith in myself than in any other thing here below. But I have never felt a need to be silent, where I have admired; that is why I proclaim my enthusiasm for Madame de Staël and Lord Byron. What is sweeter than admiration? It is love in Heaven, affection raised to a cult; we feel ourselves thrilled with gratitude for the divinity which extends the bases of our faculties, opens out new views to our souls, gives us a happiness so great and so pure, with no admixture of fear or envy. For the rest, the little cavil which I have raised in these Memoirs against the greatest poet whom England has possessed since Milton proves only one thing: the high value which I would have attached to the recollection of his muse. [Sidenote: The real Byron.] Lord Byron started a deplorable school: I presume he has been as much distressed at the Childe-Harolds to whom he gave birth as I am at the Renés who rave around me. The life of Lord Byron is the object of much investigation and calumny: young men have taken magic words seriously; women have felt disposed to allow themselves affrightedly to be seduced by that "monster," to console that solitary and unhappy Satan. Who knows? He had perhaps not found the woman he sought, a woman fair enough, a heart as big as his own. Byron, according to the phantasmagorial opinion, is the old serpent of seduction and corruption, because he sees the corruption of the human race; he is a fatal and suffering genius, placed between the mysteries of matter and mind, who is unable to solve the enigma of the universe, who looks upon life as a frightful and causeless irony, as a perverse smile of evil; he is the son of despair, who despises and denies, who, bearing an incurable wound within himself, seeks his revenge by leading through voluptuousness to sorrow all who approach him; he is a man who has not passed through the age of innocence, who has never had the advantage of being rejected and cursed by God: a man who, issuing reprobate from nature's womb, is the damned soul of nihility.