This whim has been commemorated in some
well-known verses of his own; and the cup itself, which, apart from
any revolting ideas it may excite, forms by no means an inelegant
object to the eye, is, with many other interesting relics of Lord
Byron, in the possession of the present proprietor of Newstead Abbey,
Colonel Wildman.]
[Footnote 114: Rousseau appears to have been conscious of a similar
sort of change in his own nature:--"They have laboured without
intermission," he says, in a letter to Madame de Boufflers, "to give
to my heart, and, perhaps, at the same time to my genius, a spring and
stimulus of action, which they have not inherited from nature. I was
born weak,--ill treatment has made me strong."--Hume's _Private
Correspondence_.]
[Footnote 115: "It was bitterness that they mistook for
frolic."--Johnson's account of himself at the university, in Boswell.]
[Footnote 116: The poet Cowper, it is well known, produced that
masterpiece of humour, John Gilpin, during one of his fits of morbid
dejection; and he himself says, "Strange as it may seem, the most
ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood,
and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at
all."]
[Footnote 117: The reconciliation which took place between him and Dr.
Butler, before his departure, is one of those instances of placability
and pliableness with which his life abounded. We have seen, too, from
the manner in which he mentions the circumstance in one of his
note-books, that the reconcilement was of that generously
retrospective kind, in which not only the feeling of hostility is
renounced in future, but a strong regret expressed that it had been
ever entertained.
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