desires to make is small in itself, as must always be that presented
from an individual to a nation; but he trusts that it will not be the
last they will receive from his countrymen. His distance from the
frontier, and the feeling of his personal incapacity to contribute
efficaciously to the service of the nation, prevents him from proposing
himself as worthy of the lowest commission, for which experience and
talent might be requisite. But if, as a mere volunteer, his presence
were not a burden to whomsoever he might serve under, he would repair to
whatever place the Neapolitan Government might point out, there to obey
the orders and participate in the dangers of his commanding officer,
without any other motive than that of sharing the destiny of a brave
nation, defending itself against the self-called Holy Alliance, which
but combines the vice of hypocrisy with despotism."[17]

It was during the agitation of this crisis, while surrounded by rumours
and alarms, and expecting, every moment, to be summoned into the field,
that Lord Byron commenced the Journal which I am now about to give; and
which it is impossible to peruse, with the recollection of his former
Diary of 1814 in our minds, without reflecting how wholly different, in
all the circumstances connected with them, were the two periods at which
these records of his passing thoughts were traced. The first he wrote at
a time which may be considered, to use his own words, as "the most
poetical part of his whole life,"--_not_ certainly, in what regarded the
powers of his genius, to which every succeeding year added new force and
range, but in all that may be said to constitute the poetry of
character,--those fresh, unworldly feelings of which, in spite of his
early plunge into experience, he still retained the gloss, and that
ennobling light of imagination, which, with all his professed scorn of
mankind, still followed in the track of his affections, giving a lustre
to every object on which they rested. There was, indeed, in his