indeed, would have been nothing without the Venetian sunsets."

Those painful feelings of regret with which Lord Byron looked back upon his residence at Venice, attended, in some degree, every retrospect of his life. He had doomed himself to the most unhappy of all pursuits— that of pleasure-falsely so called. With a spirit capable of appreciating those high and exquisite gratifications which follow upon pure and noble designs; with a genius fitted to carry those designs into honourable execution, and with a thousand generous qualities of heart to adorn and illustrate the splendid exertions of his intellect, the life of Lord Byron might well have won for him the admiration, the respect, and the affection of the world. Had he dedicated to the service of others the genius which he lavished on the shrine of his own false fame, had he looked for happiness where it is alone to be found, not in the vanity of sensual pleasures, not in the race of personal ambition, but in the pursuit of those lofty duties which, while they elevate the character, fill and satisfy the heart, how widely different would have been his feelings! Shame for mispent time, and regret for misapplied powers, filled with bitterness a heart which a sense of no other ambition would have awakened to the purest pleasures.

But, unfortunately, the ambition of Lord Byron was entirely personal.-His poetry, his letters, his conversations, are filled with multiplied images of himself. In his most momentous as well as in his most trifling actions, in parliament and in the drawing-room, there was the same consciousness of personal display, the same sensi

tive feeling of personal impression. In speaking to his confidential friends on the subject of his first speech in parliament, all his anxiety seems to have been expended on the impression of his own powers which that speech conveyed; not a word, not a thought is wasted. on the suffering artisans whose interests were connected with it. In society the perpetual consciousness of his personal appearance haunted him and influenced every movement; while even in that most momentous step of his whole life-his unhappy marriage-the overwhelming idea of self was still predominant. It is only by the abandonment of every such weak, and vain, and unworthy feeling, by mortifying and subduing the falsely selfish principle, that a truly ambitious man will hope to gratify his pride, exalted in the exaltation of those whom his hand has contributed to raise, and happy in the happiness which he himself has created.