Page:Journal of Conversations with Lord Byron.pdf/96

 I should positively have destroyed myself, but guessed that - or - would write my life, and with this fear before my eyes, I have lived on. I know so well the sort of things they would write of me - the excuses, lame as myself, that they would offer for my delinquencies, while they were unnecessarily exposing them, and all this done with the avowed intention of justifying, what, God help me! cannot be justified, my unpoetical reputation, with which the world can have nothing to do! One of my friends would dip his pen in clarified honey, and the other in vinegar, to describe my manifold transgressions, and as I do not wish my poor fame to be either preserved or pickled, I have lived on and written my Memoirs, where facts will speak for themselves, without the editorial candor of excuses, such as 'we cannot excuse this unhappy error, or defend that impropriety!' - the mode," continued Byron, "in which friends exalt their own prudence and virtue, by exhibiting the want of those qualities in the dear departed, and by marking their disapproval of his errors. I have written my Memoirs," said Byron, "to save the necessity of their being written by a friend or friends, and have only to hope they will not add notes."

I remarked, with a smile, that at all events he anticipated hi, friends by saying beforehand as