"In all his portraits of himself, the pencil he uses is so dark that the picture of his temperament and his self-attempts, covering as they do with a dark shadow the shade itself, must be taken with large allowance for exaggeration."
In another passage of his work, Moore further says:—
"To the perverse fancy he had for falsifying his own character, and even imputing to himself faults the most alien to his nature, I have already frequently adverted. I had another striking instance of it one day at La Mira."
Moore then relates that, on leaving Venice, he went to La Mira to bid Lord Byron farewell. Passing through the hall, he saw the little Allegra, who had just returned from a walk. Moore made some remark on the beauty of the child, and Byron answered, "Have you any notion—but I suppose you have—of what they call the parental feeling? For myself, I have not the least." And yet, when that child died, in a year or two afterward, he who had uttered this artificial speech was so overwhelmed by the event, that those who were about him at the time actually trembled for his reason.[98]
Colonel Stanhope, afterward Lord Harrington, who knew Lord Byron in Greece, shortly before his death, says:—
"Most men affect a virtuous character; Lord Byron's ambition, on the contrary, seemed to be to make the world believe that he was a sort of Satan, though impelled by high sentiments to accomplish great actions. Happily for his reputation, he possessed another quality that unmasked him completely: he was the most open and most sincere of men, and his nature, inclined to good, ever swayed all his actions."[99]
Mr. Finlay, who knew Lord Byron about the same time, says that not only he calumniated himself, but that he hid his best sentiments.
Speaking of the simplicity of his manners, and his repugnance for all emphasis:—
"I have always observed," continues Mr. Finlay, "that he adopted a very simple and even monotonous tone, when he had to say any thing not quite in the ordinary style of conversation. Whenever he had begun a sentence which showed that the subject interested him, and which contained sublime thought, he would check himself suddenly, and come to an end without concluding, either with a smile of indifference or in a careless tone. I thought he had adopted this mode to hide his real sentiments when he feared lest his tongue should be carried away by his heart; and often he did so evidently to hide the author or rather the poet. But in satire or clever conversation his genius took full flight."[100]
And Stanhope further adds:—