the _Hours of Idleness_, still proceeding from the local press at Newark,
were given to the world. In June we find the poet again writing from his
college rooms, dwelling with boyish detail on his growth in height and
reduction in girth, his late hours and heavy potations, his comrades, and
the prospects of his book. From July to September he dates from London,
excited by the praises of some now obscure magazine, and planning a
journey to the Hebrides. In October he is again settled at Cambridge, and
in a letter to Miss Pigot, makes a humorous reference to one of his
fantastic freaks: "I have got a new friend, the finest in the world--a
_tame bear_. When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do
with him, and my reply was, 'He should sit for a fellowship.' This answer
delighted them not." The greater part of the spring and summer of 1808 was
spent at Dorant's Hotel, Albemarle Street. Left to himself, he seems
during this period for the first time to have freely indulged in
dissipations, which are in most lives more or less carefully concealed.
But Byron, with almost unparalleled folly, was perpetually taking the
public into his confidence, and all his "sins of blood," with the strange
additions of an imaginative effrontery, have been thrust before us in a
manner in which Rochester or Rousseau might have thought indelicate.
Nature and circumstances conspired the result. With passions which he is
fond of comparing to the fires of Vesuvius and Hecla, he was, on his
entrance into a social life which his rank helped to surround with
temptations, unconscious of any sufficient motive for resisting them; he
had no one to restrain him from the whim of the moment, or with sufficient
authority to give him effective advice. A temperament of general
despondency, relieved by reckless outbursts of animal spirits, is the
least favourable to habitual self-control. The melancholy of Byron was not
of the pensive and innocent kind attributed to Cowley, rather that of the,
[Greek: melancholikoi] of whom Aristotle asserts, with profound
psychological or physiological intuition, that they are [Greek: aei en