proved an amiable and well-conducted man, than the questionable and
extraordinary being who has alike provoked the malice and interested
the admiration of the world.

Posterity, while acknowledging the eminence of his endowments, and
lamenting the habits which his unhappy circumstances induced, will
regard it as a curious phenomenon in the fortunes of the individual,
that the progress of his fame as a poet should have been so similar
to his history as a man.

His first attempts, though displaying both originality and power,
were received with a contemptuous disdain, as cold and repulsive as
the penury and neglect which blighted the budding of his youth. The
unjust ridicule in the review of his first poems, excited in his
spirit a discontent as inveterate as the feeling which sprung from
his deformity: it affected, more or less, all his conceptions to
such a degree that he may be said to have hated the age which had
joined in the derision, as he cherished an antipathy against those
persons who looked curiously at his foot. Childe Harold, the most
triumphant of his works, was produced when the world was kindliest
disposed to set a just value on his talents; and his latter
productions, in which the faults of his taste appear the broadest,
were written when his errors as a man were harshest in the public
voice.

These allusions to the incidents of a life full of contrarieties, and
a character so strange as to be almost mysterious, sufficiently show
the difficulties of the task I have undertaken. But the course I
intend to pursue will relieve me from the necessity of entering, in
any particular manner, upon those debatable points of his personal