There never was a time when Byron did not seek out beautiful retreats in Nature as the source of his highest happiness. Hence, solitude was nothing to him when he could commune with the works of God. His biographer declares that in 1821 "he was greatly improved in every respect,--in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health and happiness. He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued." He was always temperate in his diet, living chiefly on fish and vegetables; and if he drank more wine and spirits than was good for him, it was to rally his exhausted energies. His powers of production were never greater than at this period, but his literary labors were slowly wearing him out. He could not live without work, while pleasure palled upon him. In a letter to a stranger who sought to convert him, he showed anything but anger or contempt. "Do me," says he, "the justice to suppose, that Video meliora proboque, however the deteriora sequor may have been applied to my conduct." Writing to Murray in 1822, he says: "It is not impossible that I may have three or four cantos of 'Don Juan' ready by autumn, as I obtained a permission from my dictatress [the Countess Guiccioli] to continue it,--provided always it was to be more guarded and decorous in the continuation than in the commencement." Alas, he could not undo the mischief he had done!
About this time Byron received a visit from Lord Clare, his earliest friend at Cambridge, to whom through life he was devotedly attached,--a friendship which afforded exceeding delight. He never forgot his few friends, although he railed at his enemies. He was ungenerously treated by Leigh Hunt, to whom he rendered every kindness. He says,--
"I have done all I could for him since he came here [Genoa], but it is all most useless. His wife is ill, his six children far from tractable, and in worldly affairs he himself is a child. The death of Shelley left them totally aground; and I could not see them in such a state without using the common feelings of humanity, and what means were in my power, to set them afloat again.... As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion between him and me there is little or none; but I think him a good-principled man, and must do as I would be done by."
Toward Shelley, Byron entertained the greatest respect and affection for his suavity, gentleness, and good breeding; and Shelley's accidental death was a great shock to him. Among his other intimate acquaintances in Italy were Lord and Lady Blessington, with whom he kept up a pleasant correspondence. The most plaintive, sad, and generous of all his letters was the one he wrote to Lady Byron from Pisa, in 1821, in acknowledgment of the receipt of a tress of his daughter Ada's hair:--
"The time which has elapsed since our separation has been considerably more than the whole brief period of our union and of our prior acquaintance. We both made a bitter mistake; but now it is over, and irrecoverably so.... But this very impossibility of reunion seems to me at least a reason why on all the few points of discussion which can arise between us, we should preserve the courtesies of life, and as much of its kindness as people who are never to meet may preserve more easily than nearer connections.... I assure you I bear you now no resentment whatever. Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things,--that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet again."
At this period, about a year before Byron's death, Moore thus writes:--
"To the world, and more especially England, he presented himself in no other aspect than that of a stern, haughty misanthrope, self-banished from the society of men, and most of all from that of Englishmen. The more beautiful and genial inspirations of his muse were looked upon but as lucid intervals between the paroxysms of an inherent malignancy of nature. But how totally all this differed from the Byron of the social hour, they who lived in familiar intercourse with him may be safely left to tell. As it was, no English gentleman ever approached him with the common forms of introduction, that did not come away at once surprised and charmed by the kind courtesy of his manners, the unpretending play of his conversation, and on nearer intercourse the frank, youthful spirits, to the flow of which he gave way with such zest as to produce the impression that gaiety was after all the true bent of his disposition."
Scott, writing of him after his death, says,--
"In talents he was unequalled; and his faults were those rather of a bizarre temper, arising from an eager and irritable nervous habit, than any depravity of disposition. He was devoid of selfishness, which I take to be the basest ingredient in the human composition. He was generous, humane, and noble-minded, when passion did not blind him."
About this time, 1823, the great struggle of the Greeks to shake off the Ottoman yoke was in progress. I have already in another volume[1] attempted to give the facts in relation to that memorable movement. Christendom sympathized with the gallant but apparently hopeless struggle of a weak nation to secure its independence, both from a sentiment of admiration for the freedom of ancient Greece in the period of its highest glories, and from the love of liberty which animated the liberal classes amid the political convulsions of the day. But the governments of Europe were loath to complicate the difficulties which existed between nations in that stormy period, and dared not extend any open aid to struggling Greece, beyond giving their moral aid to the Greek cause, lest it should embroil Europe in war, of which she was weary. Less than ten years had elapsed since Europe had combined to dethrone Napoleon, and some of her leading powers, like Austria and Russia, had a detestation of popular insurrections.