fond and tame,

Byron is emphatically a citizen of the world, who has "not only painted the environs, but reflected the passions and aspirations of every scene which he visualizes." And it is this magic power of conveying the authentic impression of an actual occurrence, which renders his most recondite situations so thrilling,—which breathes a Western vigour into the scented air of the Orient, and thrills with poignant pathos through the horrors of the Prisoner of Chillon.

Unhappily, all these shifting scenes of imagination or experience—so the poet has made mournful confession—have little power to wean him from himself. "Neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, above, around, and beneath me."

And although, it will be noticed, he exempts the sea—and although the blood of old sea-kings, running fiercely in his veins, still kindles him to imperishable rapture in its presence,—

—yet there is sorrow on the sea itself,—the "unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea" which separates him from his mother-country. Cosmopolitan as he is, self-banished exile, quick with Greek and Italian sympathies, Byron never for one moment forgets that he is head of one of England's proudest families. Despite his scathing scorn towards his fair-weather London friends, towards the unreasoning outbursts of malignity which drove him out of his England—with all her faults, he loves her still. He vaguely hopes and hankers after a return to those long-lost shores: and endeavours to believe that the future will in some way make atonement for all the calamities of the past.

But now Shelley, Williams, Medwin, and Taafe are dismounting in the pine forest, and the men-servants setting up the target. Pistol-practice is Byron's forte; when he hits a half-crown at twelve yards he is as delighted as a boy, and quite glum and disconcerted if he should happen to miss. This very rarely happens, as he is a crack shot, easily distancing the other competitors. His hand trembles violently, but he calculates on this vibration, and, depending entirely on his eye, hardly ever fails. After about an hour's shooting, the light begins to wane towards sunset: and the friends ride back to the city, Byron in exuberant good humour with himself and everybody else. Arrived at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, he finds two guests awaiting him,—Count Pietro Gamba, brother of the lovely Contessa Guiccioli, and Trelawny, that handsome, picturesque, piratical-looking "Younger Son," who has not yet published to an astonished world his