"If I valued fame," he said in his memoranda, 1813, "I should flatter received opinions, which have gathered strength by time, and which will last longer than any living works that are opposed to them. But, for the soul of me, I can not and will not give the lie to my own thoughts and doubts, come what may. If I am a fool, I am, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom."
And then, at the same time, he wrote:—
"If I had any views in this country they would probably be parliamentary. But I have no ambition; at least, if any, it would be 'aut Cæsar aut nihil.' My hopes are limited to the arrangement of my affairs, and settling either in Italy or in the East (rather the last), and drinking deep of the language and literature of both."
The catastrophe that overtook Napoleon, his hero, and the success of fools, quite overcame him at this time:—
"Past events have unnerved me, and all I can now do is to make life an amusement and look on while others play. After all, even the highest game of crosses and sceptres, what is it? Vide Napoleon's last twelvemonth," etc., etc.
The following year (1814), when political feeling ran so high against him as to threaten his popularity on account of the lines addressed to the Princess Charlotte, which had offended the regent, who had just gone over from the Whigs to the Tories, Byron wrote to Rogers:—
"All the sayings and doings in the world shall not make me utter one word of conciliation to any thing that breathes. I shall bear what I can, and what I can not I shall resist. The worst they could do would be to exclude me from society. I have never courted it, nor, I may add, in the general sense of the word, enjoyed it—and 'there is a world elsewhere.'"
When once he had quitted England his indifference to popularity and its results further increased. He wrote from Venice to Murray:—
"I never see a newspaper, and know nothing of England, except in a letter now and then from my sister" (1816).
But that did not at all suit his publisher, who set about sending him reviews, criticisms, and keeping him up to all that was going on in the literary and political world, thinking thus to stimulate and keep alive the passions that kindle genius. Then it was that Lord Byron, considering this intellectual régime unwholesome for mind and heart, signified to Murray that their correspondence could not continue unless he consented to six indispensable conditions. We regret not being able to give the whole of this beautiful letter, circumscribed as we are by certain necessary limits. Thus we shall only quote what more particularly relates to our subject:[134]—