Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/260



A discreet young woman might have hesitated to show this album page to friends.

Byron's "tributes," when he paid them, were singularly chill. He may have buried his heart at Mrs. Spencer Smith's feet; but the lines in her album which record this interment are eloquent of a speedy resurrection. When Lady Blessington demanded some verses, he wrote them; but he explained with almost insulting lucidity that his heart was as grey as his head (he was thirty-one), and that he had nothing warmer than friendship to offer in place of extinguished affections. Moore must have wearied painfully of albums and of their rapacious demands; yet to the end of his life he could be harassed into feigning a poetic passion; but Byron stood at bay. He was a hunted creature, and the instinct of self-preservation taught him savage methods of escape.

There are people who, from some delicacy of mental fibre, find it exceedingly difficult to be