He also had periods in which he seemed to try vaguely to retrieve himself from dissipation, and to acquire self-mastery by what he called temperance.

But, ignorant and excessive in all his movements, his very efforts at temperance were intemperate.  From violent excesses in eating and drinking, he would pass to no less unnatural periods of utter abstinence.  Thus the very conservative power which Nature has of adapting herself to any settled course was lost.  The extreme sensitiveness produced by long periods of utter abstinence made the succeeding debauch more maddening and fatal.  He was like a fine musical instrument, whose strings were every day alternating between extreme tension and perfect laxity.  We have in his Journal many passages, of which the following is a specimen:—­

’I have dined regularly to-day, for the first time since Sunday last; this being Sabbath too,—­all the rest, tea and dry biscuits, six per diem.  I wish to God I had not dined, now!  It kills me with heaviness, stupor, and horrible dreams; and yet it was but a pint of bucellas, and fish.  Meat I never touch, nor much vegetable diet.  I wish I were in the country, to take exercise, instead of being obliged to cool by abstinence, in lieu of it.  I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh:  my bones can well bear it.  But the worst is, the Devil always came with it, till I starved him out; and I will not be the slave of any appetite.  If I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way.  O my head! how it aches!  The horrors of digestion!  I wonder how Bonaparte’s dinner agrees with him.’—­Moore’s Life, vol. ii. p.264.

From all the contemporary history and literature of the times, therefore, we have reason to believe that Lord Byron spoke the exact truth when he said to Medwin,—­

’My own master at an age when I most required a guide, left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.’—­Medwin’s Conversations, p.42.

Utter prostration of the whole physical man from intemperate excess, the deadness to temptation which comes from utter exhaustion, was his condition, according to himself and Moore, when he first left England, at twenty-one years of age.

In considering his subsequent history, we are to take into account that it was upon the brain and nerve-power, thus exhausted by early excess, that the draughts of sudden and rapid literary composition began to be made.  There was something unnatural and unhealthy in the rapidity, clearness, and vigour with which his various works followed each other.  Subsequently to the first two cantos of ‘Childe Harold,’ ’The Bride of Abydos,’ ‘The Corsair,’ ‘The Giaour,’ ‘Lara,’ ‘Parisina,’