to its nature. Moreover, a toothless satire is verse without poetry-
-the most odious of all respectable things.

But, without regard to the merits or delinquency of the poem, to the
acumen of its animadversions, or to the polish of the lines, it
possesses, in the biography of the author, a value of the most
interesting kind. It was the first burst of that dark, diseased
ichor, which afterwards coloured his effusions; the overflowing
suppuration of that satiety and loathing, which rendered Childe
Harold, in particular, so original, incomprehensible, and antisocial;
and bears testimony to the state of his feelings at that important
epoch, while he was yet upon the threshold of the world, and was
entering it with a sense of failure and humiliation, and premature
disgust. For, notwithstanding his unnecessary expositions concerning
his dissipation, it is beyond controversy, that at no time could it
be said he was a dissipated young man. That he indulged in
occasional excesses is true; but his habits were never libertine, nor
did his health or stamina permit him to be distinguished in
licentiousness. The declaration in which he first discloses his
sobriety, contains more truth than all his pretensions to his
father's qualities. "I took my gradations in the vices," says he, in
that remarkable confession, "with great promptitude, but they were
not to my taste; for my early passions, though violent in the
extreme, were concentrated, and hated division or spreading abroad.
I could have left or lost the whole world with or for that which I
loved; but, though my temperament was naturally burning, I could not
share in the common libertinism of the place and time without
disgust; and yet this very disgust, and my heart thrown back upon
itself, threw me into excesses perhaps more fatal than those from
which I shrunk, as fixing upon one at a time the passions, which,