He added to it the charm of a personality, and when that personality was enforced by a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows as the age's sorrows, endowed itself with an air of symbolism and set itself up as a kind of scapegoat for the nation's sins, its triumph was complete.

Most men have from time to time to resist the temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even resist it.

For all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by pessimism, and for all the others who would have loved to believe it, Byron and his poetry came as an echo of themselves.

Shallow called to shallow.

Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their own minds.
But he was not altogether a man of pretence.