might have been looked for as the result of such brilliant achievements at so early an age. His mad, absorbing passion, too, may have scored many a furrow in the hero's heart, while his young brow remained smooth and fair as marble. 'On vieillit bientôt sur le champ de bataille!' and the first Napoleon's aphorism holds good no surer on the field of honour than in the lists of love. Shelley's fate was scarcely an enviable one; and did you like Byron any better after you had read his letters and learned the demoralizing effects, even on such genius as his, of temples crowned by an immortal Fame, ere yet the beard had sprouted on his chin?
"Alexander of Macedon, indeed, conquered the world before he was thirty, and—drank himself to death ere he had reached his prime!
"The fact that he does not care one straw
