To the moral sense so dangerous are the effects of this quality, that it would hardly, perhaps, be generalising too widely to assert that wheresoever great versatility of power exists, there will also be found a tendency to versatility of principle. The poet Chatterton, in whose soul the seeds of all that is good and bad in genius so prematurely ripened, said, in the consciousness of this multiple faculty, that he "held that man in contempt who could not write on both sides of a question;" and it was by acting in accordance with this principle himself that he brought one of the few stains upon his name which a life so short afforded time to incur. Mirabeau, too, when, in the legal warfare between his father and mother, he helped to draw up for each the pleadings against the other, was influenced less, no doubt, by the pleasure of mischief than by this pride of talent, and lost sight of the unnatural perfidy of the task in the adroitness with which he executed it.
The quality which I have here denominated versatility, as applied to power, Lord Byron has himself designated by the French word "mobility," as applied to feeling and conduct; and, in one of the Cantos of Don Juan, has described happily some of its lighter features. After telling us that his hero had begun to doubt, from the great predominance of this quality in her, "how much of Adeline was real," he says,—
"So well she acted, all and every part,
By turns,—with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err—'tis merely what is called mobility,
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false—though true; for surely they're sincerest,
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest."