wine twenty times as good in the cellar: "No doubt, no doubt, but my dear fellow, this is quite good enough for such canaille as you have got to-day." He carried on the Byronic dandyism as a readily available means of imposing upon the imagination of his time. As late as 1833, he is described as appearing at a dinner in "a black velvet coat lined with satin; purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles, falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves, with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulder."
The inside of his romantic ostentation at the age of twenty-nine, his clear-eyed egotism, the anguish of his ambition, the drive and direction of his lust for power, are revealed in a fragment of the journal that he kept in 1833:
My life has not been a happy one. Nature has iven me an awful ambition and fiery passions. My life has been a struggle, with moments of rapture—a storm with dashes of moonlight—Love, Poetry. . . . I make it a rule never to throw myself open to men. I do not grudge them the knowledge I could impart but I am always exhausted by composition when I enter society, and little inclined to talk, and as I never get anything in return, I do not think the exertion necessary. . . .
The world calls me conceited. The world is in error. I trace all the blunders of my life to sacrificing my own opinion to that of others. . . . I have an unerring instinct—I can read characters at