Excerpt from The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 2 of 17: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life But however incompatible such a life must have been with those habits of contemplation, by which, and which only, the faculties he had already dis played could be ripened, or those that were still latent could be unfolded, yet, in another point of view, the time now apparently squandered by him, was, in after-days, turned most invaluably to account. By thus initiating him into a knowledge Of the vari eties of human character, - by giving him an insight into the details of society, in their least artificial form, - in short, by mixing him up, thus early, with the world, its business and its pleasures, his London life but contributed its share in forming that won derful combinationwhich his mind afterwards ex hibited, of the imaginative and the practical - the heroic and the humorous of the keenest and most dissecting views of real life, with the grandest and most spiritualised conceptions of ideal grandeur. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.