He possessed the faculty of moral ideality in a high degree; and he had not, in the earlier part of his life, an attraction towards mere brutal vice.
His physical sensitiveness was so remarkable that he says of himself, 'A dose of salts has the effect of a temporary inebriation, like light champagne, upon me.' Yet this exceptionally delicately-organised boy and youth was in a circle where not to conform to the coarse drinking-customs of his day was to incur censure and ridicule.

That he early acquired the power of bearing large quantities of liquor is manifested by the record in his Journal, that, on the day when he read the severe 'Edinburgh' article upon his schoolboy poems, he drank three bottles of claret at a sitting.
Yet Byron was so far superior to his times, that some vague impulses to physiological prudence seem to have suggested themselves to him, and been acted upon with great vigour.

He never could have lived so long as he did, under the exhaustive process of every kind of excess, if he had not re-enforced his physical nature by an assiduous care of his muscular system.

He took boxing-lessons, and distinguished himself in all athletic exercises.
He also had periods in which he seemed to try vaguely to retrieve himself from dissipation, and to acquire self-mastery by what he called temperance.
But, ignorant and excessive in all his movements, his very efforts at temperance were intemperate.

From violent excesses in eating and drinking, he would pass to no less unnatural periods of utter abstinence.
Thus the very conservative power which Nature has of adapting herself to any settled course was lost.