Born, in London, 22 Jan. 1788. Lame from birth. Early years spent with mother in Aberdeen. Educated at private schools there, and at Grammar School, 1794–98. Succeeded to title on death of grand-uncle, May 1798. To Newstead with his mother, autumn of 1799. Made ward in Chancery under guardianship of Lord Carlisle. To school at Nottingham. To London for treatment for lameness, 1799. To Dr. Glennie’s school at Dulwich, 1799. At Harrow, summer of 1801 to 1805. To Trinity Coll., Cambridge, Oct. 1805; M.A., 4 July 1808. On leaving Cambridge, settled at Newstead. Took seat in House of Lords, 13 March 1809. Started on “grand tour,” 2 July 1809, to Spain, Malta, Turkey, Greece. Returned to England, July 1811. Settled in St. James’s Street, London, Oct. 1811. Spoke for first time in House of Lords, 27 Feb. 1812. Married Anne Isabella Milbanke, 2 Jan. 1815. Settled in Piccadilly Terrace, London, March 1815. Daughter born, 10 Dec. 1815. Separation from wife, Feb. 1816. Left England, 24 April 1816. To Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy. Amour with Miss Clairmont, 1816–17. Daughter born by her, Jan. 1817 (died April 1822). Settled in Venice, 1817. Amour with Countess Guiccioli, April to Oct. 1819. To Ravenna, Christmas 1819. Prolific literary production. “Marino Faliero” performed at Drury Lane, spring of 1821. To Pisa, Oct. 1821. “The Liberal” published (4 nos. only), with Leigh Hunt and Shelley, 1823. Elected member of Greek Committee in London, 1823. Sailed from Genoa for Greece, 15 July 1823. Raising Suliote troops on behalf of Greeks against Turks at Missolonghi, Dec. 1823. Serious illness, Feb. 1824. Died, 19 April 1824. Buried in England, at Hucknall Torkard. Works: “Fugitive Pieces” (privately printed, all destroyed except two copies), 1806 (a facsimile privately reprinted, 1886); “Poems on Various Occasions” (anon., same as preceding, with omissions), 1807; “Hours of Idleness,” 1807; “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (anon.), 1809 (2nd edn. same year); Poems contrib. to J. C. Hobhouse’s “Imitations and Translations,” 1809; “Childe Harold,” cantos 1 and 2, 1812 (2nd–5th edns., same year); “The Curse of Minerva” (anon.), 1812; “The Waltz” (under pseud. of “Horace Hornem”), 1813; “The Giaour,” 1813; “The Bride of Abydos,” 1813 (2nd–5th edns., same year); “The Corsair,” 1814; “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” (anon.), 1814; “Lara” (anon., with Rogers’s “Jacqueline”), 1814; “Hebrew Melodies,” 1815; “Siege of Corinth” (anon.), 1816; “Parisina,” 1816 (second edn., with preceding work, same year); “Poems,” 1816; “Poems on his Domestic Circumstances,” 1816; “Prisoner of Chillon,” 1816; “Childe Harold,” canto 3, 1816; “Monody on the Death of Sheridan” (anon.), 1816; “Fare Thee Well!” 1816; “Manfred,” 1817 (2nd edn., same year); “The Lament of Tasso,” 1817; “Poems Written by Somebody” (anon.), 1818; “Childe Harold,” canto 4, 1818; “Beppo” (anon.), 1818; “Suppressed Poems,” 1818; “Three Poems not included in the Works of Lord Byron,” 1818; “Don Juan,” cantos 1 and 2 (anon.), 1819; “Mazeppa,” 1819; “Marino Faliero,” 1820; “Don Juan,” cantos 3–5 (anon.), 1821; “Prophecy of Dante” (with 2nd edn. of “Marino Faliero”), 1821; “Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain,” 1821; “Letter … on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on Pope,” 1821; “Werner,” 1822; “Don Juan,” cantos 6–14 (anon.), 1823; “The Liberal,” with Leigh Hunt and Shelley (anon., 4 nos.), 1823; “The Age of Bronze” (anon.), 1823; “The Island,” 1823 (2nd edn., same year); “The Deformed Transformed,” 1823; “Heaven and Earth” (anon.), 1824; “Don Juan,” cantos 15, 16 (anon.), 1824 (canto 17 of “Don Juan,” 1829, and “Twenty Suppressed Stanzas,” 1838, are spurious); “Parliamentary Speeches,” 1824; “The Vision of Judgment” (anon., reprinted from pt. i. of “The Liberal”), 1824. Posthumous: “Correspondence with a Friend” (3 vols.), 1825; “Letters and Journals,” edited by T. Moore (2 vols.), 1830. Collected Works: in 8 vols., 1815–17; in 5 vols., 1817; in 5 vols., 1818–20; in 4 vols., 1828; “Life and Works” (17 vols.), 1832–35, etc. Life: “Lord Byron and his Contemporaries,” by Leigh Hunt, 1828; life by Moore, 1830; by Galt, 1830; by Jeaffreson, 1883; by Roden Noel (“Great Writers” series), 1890.

Personal

  Of Lord Byron I can tell you only his appearance is nothing that you would remark.

  I called on Lord Byron to-day, with an introduction from Mr. Gilford. Here, again, my anticipations were mistaken. Instead of being deformed, as I had heard, he is remarkably well built, with the exception of his feet. Instead of having a thin and rather sharp and anxious face, as he has in his picture, it is round, open, and smiling; his eyes are light, and not black; his air easy and careless, not forward and striking; and I found his manners affable and gentle, the tones of his voice low and conciliating, his conversation gay, pleasant, and interesting in an uncommon degree.

  A countenance, exquisitely modeled to the expression of feeling and passion, and exhibiting the remarkable contrast of very dark hair and eye-brows, with light and expressive eyes, presented to the physiognomist the most interesting subject for the exercise of his art. The predominating expression was that of deep and habitual thought, which gave way to the that most rapid play of features when he engaged in interesting discussion; so that a brother poet compared them to the sculpture of a beautiful alabaster vase, only seen to perfection when lighted up from within. The flashes of mirth, gayety, indignation, or satirical dislike which frequently animated Lord Byron’s countenance, might, during an evening’s conversation, be mistaken by a stranger, for the habitual expression, so easily and happily was it formed for them all; but those who had an opportunity of studying his features for a length of time, and upon various occasions, both of rest and emotion, will agree with us that their proper language was that of melancholy.

  If you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely disbelieve him. So beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw—his teeth so many stationary smiles, his eyes the open portals of the sun—things of light and for light—and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreaths and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering.

  I was introduced, at the theatre, to Lord Byron.—What a grand countenance!—it is impossible to have finer eyes!—the divine man of genius!—He is yet scarcely twenty-eight years of age, and he is the first poet in England, probably in the world; when he is listening to music it is a countenance worthy of the beau-ideal of the Greeks. For the rest, let a man be ever so great a poet, let him besides be the head of one of the most ancient families in England, this is too much for our age, and I have learnt with pleasure that Lord Byron is a wretch. When he came into the drawing-room of Madame de Staël, at Copet, all the English ladies left it. Our unfortunate man of genius had the imprudence to marry,—his wife is very clever, and has renewed at his expense the old story of “Tom Jones and Blifil.” Men of genius are generally mad, or at the least very imprudent! His lordship was so atrocious, as to take an actress into keeping for two months. If he had been a blockhead, nobody would have concerned themselves with his following the example of almost all young men of fashion; but it is well known that Mr. Murray, the bookseller, gives him two guineas a line for all the verses he sends him. He is absolutely the counterpart of M. de Mirabeau; the feodalists, before the Revolution, not knowing how to answer the “Eagle of Marseilles,” discovered that he was a monster.

	Thou, whose true name the world yet knows not,
	Mysterious spirit, man, angel, or devil.

  I come at once to his lordship’s charge against me, blowing away the abuse with which it is frothed, and evaporating a strong acid in which it is suspended. The residuum, then, appears to be, that “Mr. Southey, on his return from Switzerland (in 1817), scattered abroad calumnies, knowing them to be such, against Lord Byron and others.” To this I reply with a direct and positive denial. If I had been told in that country that Lord Byron had turned Turk, or monk of La Trappe,—that he had furnished a harem, or endowed a hospital, I might have thought the report, whichever it had been, possible, and repeated it accordingly, passing it, as it had been taken, in the small change of conversation, for no more than it was worth. In this manner I might have spoken of him as of Baron Gerambe, the Green Man, the Indian Jugglers, or any other figurante of the time being. There was no reason for any particular delicacy on my part in speaking of his lordship; and, indeed, I should have thought anything which might be reported of him would have injured his character as little as the story which so greatly annoyed Lord Keeper Guilford—that he had ridden a rhinoceros. He may ride a rhinoceros, and though every one would stare, no one would wonder. But making no inquiry concerning him when I was abroad, because I felt no curiosity, I heard nothing, and had nothing to repeat.

  Saw Lord Byron for the first time. The impression of the first few minutes disappointed me, as I had, both from the portraits and descriptions given, conceived a different idea of him. I had fancied him taller, with a more dignified and commanding air; and I looked in vain for the hero-looking sort of person with whom I had so long identified him in imagination. His appearance is, however, highly prepossessing; his head is finely shaped, and the forehead open, high, and noble; his eyes are gray and full of expression, but one is visibly larger than the other; the nose is large and well shaped, but from being a little too thick, it looks better in profile than in front-face; his mouth is the most remarkable feature in his face, the upper lip of Grecian shortness, and the corners descending; the lips full and finely cut. In speaking, he shows his teeth very much, and they are white and even; but I observed that even in his smile—and he smiles frequently—there is something of a scornful expression in his mouth that is evidently natural, and not, as many suppose, affected. This particularly struck me. His chin is large and well shaped, and finishes well the oval of his face. He is extremely thin; indeed, so much so that his figure has almost a boyish air; his face is peculiarly pale, but not the paleness of ill-health, as its character is that of fairness, the fairness of a dark-haired person—and his hair (which is getting rapidly gray) is of a very dark brown, and curls naturally: he uses a great deal of oil in it, which makes it look still darker. His countenance is full of expression, and changes with the subject of conversation; it gains on the beholder the more it is seen, and leaves an agreeable impression. I should say that melancholy was its prevailing character, as I noticed that when any observation elicited a smile—and they were many, as the conversation was gay and playful—it appeared to linger but for a moment on his lip, which instantly resumed its former expression of seriousness. His whole appearance is remarkably gentlemanlike, and he owes nothing of this to his toilet, as his coat appears to have been many years made, is much too large—and all his garments convey the idea of having been purchased ready-made, so ill do they fit him. There is a gaucherie in his movements, which evidently proceeds from the perpetual consciousness of his lameness, that appears to haunt him; for he tries to conceal his foot when seated, and when walking has a nervous rapidity in his manner. He is very slightly lame, and the deformity of his foot is so little remarkable that I am not now aware which foot it is.

  Unlooked-for event! deplorable misfortune! But a short time has elapsed since the people of this deeply suffering country welcomed, with unfeigned joy and open arms, this celebrated individual to their bosoms; to-day, overwhelmed with grief and despair, they bathe his funeral couch with tears of bitterness, and mourn over it with inconsolable affliction. On Easter Sunday, the happy salutation of the day, “Christ is risen,” remained but half pronounced on the lips of every Greek; and as they met, before even congratulating one another on the return of that joyous day, the universal demand was, “How is Lord Byron?” Thousands, assembled in the spacious plain outside of the city to commemorate the sacred day, appeared as if they had assembled for the sole purpose of imploring the Saviour of the world to restore to health him who was a partaker with us in our present struggle for the deliverance of our native land. And how is it possible that any heart should remain unmoved, any lip closed upon the present occasion? Was ever Greece in greater want of assistance than when the ever-to-be-lamented Lord Byron, at the peril of his life, crossed over to Messolonghi? Then, and ever since he has been with us, his liberal hand has been opened to our necessities—necessities which our own poverty would have otherwise rendered irremediable. How many and much greater benefits did we not expect from him!—and to-day, alas! to-day, the unrelenting grave closes over him and our hopes!… All Greece, clothed in mourning and inconsolable, accompanies the procession in which it is borne; all ecclesiastical, civil and military honours attend it; all his fellow-citizens of Messolonghi and fellow-countrymen of Greece follow it, crowning it with their gratitude and bedewing it with their tears; it is blessed by the pious benedictions and prayers of our Archbishop, Bishop, and all our Clergy.

  I was told it all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words, “Byron is dead.”

  Poor Byron! alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon my heart like a mass of lead; and yet, the thought of it sends a painful twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up their base existence to its utmost bound; and this the noblest spirit in Europe should sink before half his course was run. Late so full of fire and generous passion and proud purposes; and now for ever dumb and cold. Poor Byron! and but a young man, still struggling amidst the perplexities and sorrows and aberrations of a mind not arrived at maturity, or settled in its proper place in life. Had he been spared to the age of three-score and ten, what might he not have done! what might he not have been! But we shall hear his voice no more. I dreamed of seeing him and knowing him; but the curtain of everlasting night has hid him from our eyes. We shall go to him; he shall not return to us. Adieu. There is a blank in your heart and a blank in mine since this man passed away.

  I am extremely sorry I have not had it in my power to answer the kind letter with which you have honored me, before this, being so very unwell, and so much hurt at the severe loss of my much-esteemed and ever-to-be-lamented lord and master. You wish me, Sir, to give you some information in respect to my lord’s manner and mode of life after his departure from Cephalonia, which I am very happy to say was that of a good Christian, and one who fears and serves God, in doing all the good that lay in his power, and avoiding all evil. And his charity was always without bounds; for his kind and generous heart could not see nor hear of misery, without a deep sigh, and striving in which way he could serve and soften misery, by his liberal hand, in the most effectual manner…. A greater friend to Christianity could not exist, I am fully convinced, in his daily conduct, not only making the Bible his first companion in the morning, but in regard to whatever religion a man might be of, whether Protestant, Catholic, friar, or monk, or any other religion, every priest, of whatever order, if in distress, was always most liberally rewarded, and with larger sums than any one who was not a minister of the gospel, I think, (would give). I think every thing, combined together, must prove, not only to you, Sir, but to the public at large, that my lord was not only a Christian, but a good Christian.

  I met Lord B. for the first time at Metaxata, in Cephalonia, in the month of October, 1823. On calling, I found his Lordship had ridden out with Count Gamba; I resolved to wait for his return, and was shown his only public room, which was small and scantily furnished in the plainest manner. One table was covered for dinner, another and a chair were strewed with books, and many were ranged in order on the floor…. I presented a letter of introduction, and he sat down upon the sofa, still examining me; I felt the reception more poetical than agreeable: but he immediately commenced his fascinating conversation…. Whenever he commenced a sentence which showed that the subject had engaged his mind, and that his thoughts were sublime, he checked himself, and finished a broken sentence, either with an indifferent smile, or with this annoying tone. I thought he had adopted it to conceal his feelings, when he feared to trust his tongue with the sentiments of his heart. Often, it was evident, he did it to avoid betraying the author, or rather the poet. In mere satire and wit his genius ran wild, even in conversation. I left him quite delighted, charmed to find so great a man so agreeable, yet astonished that the author of “Childe Harold,” the “Corsair,” and “Manfred,” should have said so little worth remembering.

  Honorable Lady,—After the ever to be lamented loss of your illustrious brother, with whose friendship I was so long honoured, my sole aim was to fulfil my duties towards his memory and towards those whom I knew were nearest and dearest to him when alive…. I collected all the words he uttered in those few hours in which he was certain of his danger. He said, “Poor Greece! Poor People! my poor family! Why was I not aware of this in time? but now it is too late.” Speaking of Greece he said, “I have given her my time, my money, and my health—what could I do more? Now I give her my life.” He frequently repeated that he was content to die, and regretted only that he was aware of it too late. He mentioned the names of many people and several sums of money, but it was not possible to distinguish clearly what he meant. He named his dear daughter—his sister—his wife—Hobhouse, and Kinnaird. “Why did I not go to England before I came here? I leave those that I love behind me—in other respects I am willing to die.” After six o’clock in the evening of the 18th it is certain that he suffered no pain whatever. He died in a strange land and amongst strangers, but more loved—more wept—he could not have been…. Those who are acquainted only with his writings will lament the loss of so great a genius: but I knew his heart. If to have sincere companions of your sorrows will at all alleviate them, be assured that the grief of no one can be more deeply, more truly felt than that of Your very humble ser^t. Peter Gamba.

  I never met with any man who shines so much in conversation. He shines the more, perhaps, for not seeking to shine. His ideas flow without effort, without his having occasion to think. As in his letters, he is not nice about expressions or words; there are no concealments in him, no injunctions to secrecy. He tells everything that he has thought or done without the least reserve, and as if he wished the whole world to know it; and does not throw the slightest gloss over his errors…. He hates argument, and never argues for victory. He gives every one an opportunity of sharing in the conversation, and has the art of turning it to subjects that may bring out the person with whom he converses.

  I have just finished Lord Byron’s “Conversations.”… Fifty years hence our descendants will see which is remembered best, the author of the “Excursion,” or of “Childe Harold.” But he seems to me to have wanted the power of admiration, the organ of veneration; to have been a cold, sneering, vain, Voltairish person, charitable as far as money went, and liberal so far as it did not interfere with his aristocratic notions; but very derisive, very un-English, very scornful. Captain Medwyn speaks of his suppressed laugh. How unpleasant an idea that gives! The only thing that does him much credit in the whole book is his hearty admiration of Scott…. Well, I think this book will have one good effect, it will disenchant the whole sex.

  It would be to little purpose to dwell upon the mere beauty of a countenance in which the expression of an extraordinary mind was so conspicuous. What serenity was sealed on the forehead, adorned with the finest chestnut hair, light, curling, and disposed with such art, that the art was hidden in the imitation of most pleasing nature! What varied expression in his eyes! They were of the azure colour of the heavens, from which they seemed to derive their origin. His teeth, in form, in colour, in transparency, resembled pearls; but his cheeks were too delicately tinged with the hue of the pale rose. His neck, which he was in the habit of keeping uncovered as much as the usages of society permitted, seemed to have been formed in a mould, and was very white. His hands were as beautiful as if they had been the works of art. His figure left nothing to be desired, particularly by those who found rather a grace than a defect in a certain light and gentle undulation of the person when he entered a room, and of which you hardly felt tempted to enquire the cause. Indeed it was scarcely perceptible,—the clothes he wore were so long…. His face appeared tranquil like the ocean on a fine spring morning; but, like it, in an instant became changed into the tempestuous and terrible, if a passion (a passion did I say?), a thought, a word, occurred to disturb his mind. His eyes then lost all their sweetness, and sparkled so that it became difficult to look on them…. What delighted him greatly one day annoyed him the next.

  It appears, therefore, from a review of Byron’s private character, that it was a common one, being mixed with many virtues and stained with some fashionable vices. We meet nothing in it to command our veneration: we find many things to pity and excuse, from the peculiarity of his situation; but we are not entitled to call him a virtuous, pious man…. We find, in fact, that he was like all those nominal Christians who are unregenerate:—he knew not its spirit. His conduct was not regulated by it, and he differed simply from many of those who hold in the world a very respectable character, in his having treated it with seeming ridicule in his writings, while they, perhaps, have done the same in conversation.

  Lord Byron’s face was handsome; eminently so in some respects. He had a mouth and chin fit for Apollo; and when I first knew him, there were both lightness and energy all over his aspect. But his countenance did not improve with age, and there were always some defects in it. The jaw was too big for the upper part. It had all the wilfulness of a despot in it. The animal predominated over the intellectual part of his head, inasmuch as the face altogether was large in proportion to the skull. The eyes also were set too near one another; and the nose, though handsome in itself, had the appearance when you saw it closely in front, of being grafted on the face, rather than growing properly out of it. His person was very handsome, though terminating in lameness, and tending to fat and effeminacy; which makes me remember what a hostile fair one objected to him, namely, that he had little beard…. His lameness was only in one foot, the left; and it was so little visible to casual notice, that as he lounged about a room (which he did in such a manner as to screen it) it was hardly perceivable. But it was a real and even a sore lameness. Much walking upon it fevered and hurt it. It was a shrunken foot, a little twisted.

  With the faults and foibles of Byron, Greece had nothing to do; she knew nothing of them; to her he was only “the great and noble.”… Crossing the Gulf Salamis one day in a boat, with a rough mountain Captain and his men, I pulled out a volume of Byron’s works and was reading; the wind blowing open the leaves, the Captain caught a glimpse of the portrait and recognised it. He begged to take the book, and looking for a moment, with melancholy, at the face of the noble lord, he kissed it and passed it to his men, who did the same saying, “Eeton megalos kai kalos” (“he was great and noble”).

  Of his face the beauty may be pronounced to have been of the highest order, as combining at once regularity of features with the most varied and interesting expression. The same facility, indeed, of change observable in the movements of his mind was seen also in the free play of his features, as the passing thoughts within darkened or shone through them. His eyes, though of a light grey, were capable of all extremes of expression, from the most joyous hilarity to the deepest sadness, from the very sunshine of benevolence to the most concentrated scorn or rage…. But it was in the mouth and chin that the great beauty as well as expression of his fine countenance lay…. His head was remarkably small,—so much so as to be rather out of proportion with his face. The forehead, though a little too narrow, was high, and appeared more so from his having his hair (to preserve it, as he said), shaved over the temples; while the glossy, dark-brown curls, clustering over his head, gave the finish to its beauty. When to this is added, that his nose, though handsomely, was rather thickly shaped, that his teeth were white and regular, and his complexion colourless, as good an idea perhaps as it is in the power of mere words to convey may be conceived of his features. In height he was, as he himself has informed us, five feet eight inches and a half, and to the length of his limbs he attributed his being such a good swimmer. His hands were very white, and—according to his own notion of the size of hands as indicating birth—aristocratically small. The lameness of his right foot, though an obstacle to grace, but little impeded the activity of his movements; and from this circumstance, as well as from the skill with which the foot was disguised by means of long trowsers, it would be difficult to conceive a defect of this kind less obtruding itself as a deformity; while the diffidence which a constant consciousness of the infirmity gave to his first approach and address made, in him, even lameness a source of interest.

  The young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had naturally a generous and tender heart; but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and the most judicious training. But, capriciously as nature had dealt with him, the relative to whom the office of forming his character was intrusted was more capricious still. She passed from paroxysms of rage to paroxysms of fondness. At one time she stifled him with her caresses, at another time she insulted his deformity. He came into the world, and the world treated him as his mother treated him—sometimes with kindness, sometimes with severity, never with justice. It indulged him without discrimination, and punished him without discrimination. He was truly a spoiled child; not merely the spoiled child of his parents, but the spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society.

  Perhaps the beauty of his physiognomy has been more highly spoken of than it really merited. Its chief grace consisted, when he was in a gay humour, of a liveliness which gave a joyous meaning to every articulation of the muscles and features; when he was less agreeably disposed, the expression was morose to a very repulsive degree.

  No petit maître could pay more sedulous attention than he did to external appearance, or consult with more complacency the looking glass. Even when en negligé he studied the nature of the postures he assumed as attentively as if he had been sitting for his picture, and so much value did he attach to the whiteness of his hands, that, in order not to suffer “the winds of heaven to visit them too roughly,” he constantly, and even within doors, wore gloves.

  Mrs. Arkwright is here. I know few people as agreeable as she is, so fresh and original. She told me a great deal of Mr. Hodgson, Lord Byron’s friend, and now the clergyman at Bakewell, and who, she says, is the most delightful man in the world. He was warmly attached to Lord Byron, and had lived with him in the closest intimacy for twenty-six years. He had no doubt that Lord Byron was insane; when Lady Byron left Lord Byron he sent for Mr. Hodgson, who found him perfectly mad.

  It now remains to show how far the character of Byron was influenced by disease, and what the nature of that disease was…. In one place we read of his being subject to an hysterical affection, in another of his being carried out of a theatre in a convulsive swoon; elsewhere, of an apoplectic tendency, attended with temporary deprivation of sense and motion; at another time, of nervous twitches of the features, and the limbs following any emotion of anger, and from trivial excitement, and slight indisposition, of temporary aberrations of intellect, and delirium; but no where do we find the cause of these phenomena plainly and intelligibly pointed out, nor the real name given to his disorder, till his last and fatal attack. The simple fact is, he laboured under an epileptic diathesis, and on several occasions of mental emotion, even in his early years, he had slight attacks of this disease.

  Byron had the strangest and most perverse of all vanities—the desire to surprise the world by showing, that, after all his sublime and spiritual flights, he could, on nearer inspection, be the lowest, the coarsest, the most familiar, and the most sensual of the low: and this, it is said, he exhibited in the MS. autobiography which was burnt. This is a most incomprehensible fact,—even more incomprehensible than some of the mad Confessions of Rousseau. Byron’s, perhaps, arose from the vanity of wishing to be considered a man of the world, and a man of fashion—a very mean and contemptible wish. I scorn hypocrisy; but who in a sane mind would blacken his own character with disgraceful vice beyond the truth?

  England will one day feel how ill it is—not for Byron but for herself—that the foreigner who lands upon her shores should search in vain in that Temple which should be her national Pantheon, for the Poet beloved and admired by all the nations of Europe, and for whose death Greece and Italy wept as if it had been that of the noblest of their own sons.

  Lord Byron had failings—many failings certainly, but he was untainted with any of the baser vices; and his virtues, his good qualities, were all of the higher order. He was honourable and open in all his dealings—he was generous, and he was kind. He was affected by the distress, and rarer still he was pleased with the prosperity of others. Tender-hearted he was to a degree not usual with our sex—and he shrunk, with feminine sensibility, from the sight of cruelty…. There was, indeed, something about him, not to be definitely described, but almost universally felt, which captivated those around him, and impressed them, in spite of occasional distrusts, with an attachment not only friendly but fixed. Part of this fascination may, doubtless, be ascribed to the entire self-abandonment, the incautious, it may be said the dangerous, sincerity of his private conversation; but his very weaknesses were amiable; and, as has been said of a portion of his virtues, were of a feminine character—so that the affection felt for him was as that for a favourite and sometimes froward sister.

  Byron may almost be said to have had no character at all. Every attempt to bring his virtues or his vices within the boundaries of a theory, or to represent his conduct as guided by any predominant principle of good or evil, has been accompanied by blunders and perversions. His nature had no simplicity. He seems an embodied antithesis,—a mass of contradictions,—a collection of opposite frailties and powers. Such was the versatility of his mind and morals, that it is hardly possible to discern the connection between the giddy goodness and the brilliant wickedness which he delighted to exhibit. His habit of mystification, of darkly hinting remorse for sins he never committed, of avowing virtues he never practised, increases the difficulty.

  He died among strangers, in a foreign land, without a kindred hand to close his eyes; yet he did not die unwept. With all his faults and errors, and passions and caprices, he had the gift of attaching his humble dependents warmly to him. One of them, a poor Greek, accompanied his remains to England, and followed them to the grave. I am told, that during the ceremony, he stood holding on by a pew in an agony of grief, and when all was over, seemed as if he would have gone down into the tomb with the body of his master.—A nature that could inspire such attachments, must have been generous and beneficent…. His love for Miss Chaworth, to use Lord Byron’s own expression, was “the romance of the most romantic period of his life,” and I think we can trace the effect of it throughout the whole course of his writings, coming up every now and then, like some lurking theme which runs through a complicated piece of music, and links it all in a pervading chain of melody.

	Changeful! how little do you know
	Of Byron when you call him so!
	True as the magnet is to iron
	Byron hath ever been to Byron.
	His color’d prints, in gilded frames,
	Whatever the designs and names,
	One image set before the rest,
	In shirt with falling collar drest,
	And keeping up a rolling fire at
	Patriot, conspirator, and pirate.

  In external appearance Byron realised that ideal standard with which imagination adorns genius. He was in the prime of life, thirty-four; of middle height, five feet eight and a half inches; regular features, without a stain or furrow on his pallid skin, his shoulders broad, chest open, body and limbs finely proportioned. His small highly-finished head and curly hair had an airy and graceful appearance from the massiveness and length of his throat: you saw his genius in his eyes and lips. In short, Nature could do little more than she had done for him, both in outward form and in the inward spirit she had given to animate it. But all these rare gifts to his jaundiced imagination only served to make his one personal defect (lameness) the more apparent, as a flaw is magnified in a diamond when polished; and he brooded over that blemish as sensitive minds will brood until they magnify a wart into a wen. His lameness certainly helped to make him sceptical, cynical, and savage. There was no peculiarity in his dress, it was adapted to the climate: a tartan jacket braided—he said it was the Gordon pattern, and that his mother was of that race. A blue velvet cap with a gold band, and very loose nankeen trousers strapped down so as to cover his feet; his throat was not bare, as represented in drawings…. He would exist on biscuits and soda-water for days together.

  All who knew Lord Byron personally, while thoroughly understanding the consequence of a fickleness nurtured by an excessively bad training,—that of a boy of fortune, with an impulsive and passionate nature, brought up among strangers, with traditions of wild life in his family—remember, also, that he had a strong sympathy with all that was beautiful and generous, strong tendencies of natural affection, and unquestionably a desire to do right. One of his besetting weaknesses was the excessive anxiety for approval. This betrayed him into impulsive courses, which he afterwards found a difficulty in sustaining, and his extravagant disappointment exhibited itself in ways which made him seem far more uncertain and changeful than he really was at heart.

  The man in Byron is of nature even less sincere than that of the poet. Underneath this Beltenebros there is hidden a coxcomb. He posed all through his life. He had every affectation—the writer’s, the roué’s, the dandy’s, the conspirator’s. He was constantly writing, and he pretends to despise his writings. To believe himself, he was proud of nothing but his skill in bodily exercises. An Englishman, he affects Bonapartism; a peer of the realm, he speaks of the Universal Republic with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy of fifteen. He plays at misanthropy, at disillusion: he parades his vices; he even tries to make us believe that he has committed a crime or two. Read his letters—his letters written nominally to friends, but handed about from hand to hand in London. Read his journal—a journal kept ostensibly for himself, but handed over afterwards by him to Moore with authority to publish it. The littleness which these things show is amazing.

	What helps it now, that Byron bore,
	With haughty scorn which mock’d the smart,
	Through Europe to the Ætolian shore
	The pageant of his bleeding heart?
	That thousands counted every groan,
	And Europe made his woe her own?

  Occasionally, indeed, the fervour of the poet warmed his expression, and always the fire of genius kindled his eye; but in general, an affection of fashion pervaded his manner, and the insouciance of satiety spread a languor over his conversation. He was destitute of that simplicity of thought and manner which is the attendant of the highest intellect, and which was so conspicuous in Scott. He was always aiming at effect: and the effect he desired was rather that of fashion than of genius; he sought rather to astonish than impress. He seemed blasé with every enjoyment of life, affected rather the successful roué than the great poet, and deprecated beyond the cant of morality. The impression he wished to leave on the mind was that of a man who had tasted to the dregs of all the enjoyments of life, and above all of high life, and thought everything else mere balderdash and affectation.

  Personally, I know nothing but good of him. Of what he became in his foreign banishment, when removed from all his natural ties and hereditary duties, I, personally, am ignorant. In all probability he deteriorated; he would have been more than human if he had not. But when I was in the habit of familiarly seeing him, he was kindness itself…. Byron had one preëminent fault—a fault which must be considered as deeply criminal by every one who does not, as I do, believe it to have resulted from monomania. He had a morbid love of a bad reputation. There was hardly an offence of which he would not, with perfect indifference, accuse himself. An old school-fellow, who met him on the Continent, told me that he would continually write paragraphs against himself in the foreign journals, and delight in their republication by the English newspapers as in the success of a practical joke. When anybody had related anything discreditable of Byron, assuring me that it must be true, for he had heard it from himself, I have always felt that he could not have spoken with authority, and that, in all probability, the tale was a pure invention. If I could remember, and were willing to repeat, the various misdoings which I have from time to time heard him attribute to himself, I could fill a volume. But I never believed them. I very soon became aware of this strange idiosyncrasy. It puzzled me to account for it; but there it was—a sort of diseased and distorted vanity.

  We talked of Byron and Wordsworth. “Of course,” said Tennyson, “Byron’s merits are on the surface. This is not the case with Wordsworth. You must love Wordsworth ere he will seem worthy of your love. As a boy I was an enormous admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do. I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: ‘Byron is dead!’”

	O master, here I bow before a shrine;
	Before the lordliest dust that ever yet
	Moved animate in human form divine.
	Lo! dust indeed to dust. The mould is set
	Above thee and the ancient walls are wet,
	And drip all day in dark and silent gloom,
	As if the cold gray stones could not forget
	Thy great estate shrunk to this sombre room,
	But learn to weep perpetual tears above thy tomb.

  Byron was always mean. He could pretend affection to Shelley in Italy, while he was secretly joining in the cry against him in England. He betrayed Leigh Hunt; he betrayed every hand that ever touched his. The only good thing that can be said of him is, that he finally came to despise himself; and he probably entered the Greek struggle, where he fell, from sheer desperation at the glimpse of his own degradation. As for this new revelation by Mrs. Stowe, I don’t see that it should sink Byron another degree in the opinion of any one were it proved true; it would suggest the plea of diseased instincts, which is the best that can be offered for his crimes; but his cowardice, his affectation, his deliberate meanness—pah!

  1 happened to be in London when Lord Byron’s fame was reaching its height, and saw much of him in society…. Though he was far from being a great or ambitious talker, his presence at this time made the fortune of any dinner or drawing-room party for which it could be obtained; and was always known by a crowd gathered round him, the female portion generally predominating. I have seen many of these epidemic impulses of fashion in London society, but none more marked than this. There was a certain haughtiness or seeming indifference in his manner of receiving the homage tendered him, which did not however prevent him from resenting its withdrawal—an inconsistency not limited to the case of Lord Byron. Though brought into frequent intercourse by our common travels in the East, my intimacy with him went little beyond this. He was not a man with whom it was easy to cultivate friendship. He had that double or conflicting nature, well pictured by Dante, which rendered difficult any close or continued relations with him.

  Insincerity was the real darkness of Byron’s life; he turned to the unholy love of women to assuage the anguish of a spirit, enraged, both with itself and the world.

  Had he survived he might possibly have become, as H. E. W. surmises, King of Greece, and perhaps not altogether a bad one. How strange a vista of the possibilities of history is opened by such a suggestion! Against Byron’s vices and miserable affectations, and the false ring of his whole character—which was so ludicrously exemplified by his writing “Fare thee well, and if for ever” on the back of an unpaid butcher’s bill—must always be set the honour of his self-devotion and heroism in the Greek war. If he was somewhat of a Sardanapalus, it was a Sardanapalus who could fight for a noble cause not his own. Expressing once to Mazzini my own sense that Byron could scarcely take rank as a poet, compared to Shelley, the Italian patriot replied: “Ah! but you forgot that Shelley was only a poet in words and feeling; Byron translated his poetry into action, when he went to fight for Greece.”

  Vehement in all things, Byron was especially vehement in his friendships; and despite all that may be urged to the contrary, on the strength of cynical flippancies uttered to astonish his hearers, and bitter words spoken or written under the spur of sudden resentments or the torture of exasperating suspicions, it may be averred stoutly that in choosing his friends and dealing with them he was altogether controlled by his heart…. In the domain of the affections he was, from boyhood till his hair whitened, a man of so acute a sensibility that it may well be termed morbid. To this excessive sensibility, and the various kinds of emotionality that necessarily attended it, must be attributed the quickness with which his “passions” succeeded one another…. With women he was what they pleased to make or take him for. But he was most pleased with them when they treated him as nearly as possible like “a favorite and sometimes froward sister.” The reader may smile, but must not laugh; it was as “a favorite and sometimes froward sister” that he was thought of and treated by Hobhouse and other men. What then more natural for him to like to be thought of and treated by women in the same way?

  It is not too much to say that the character of Lord Byron, though untainted by the baser vices attributed to it during the poet’s lifetime, consisted of a mass of miserable weaknesses and transparent affectations, relieved by certain amiable traits and some generous impulses.

	And lived he here? And could this sweet green isle
	Volcanic stuff to his hot heart afford,
	That he might nurse his wrath, and vent his bile
	On gods and men, this proud, mistempered lord?
	Alas! poor lord, to this soft leafy nest,
	Where only pure and heavenly thoughts should dwell,
	He brought, and bore and cherished in his breast,
	A home-bred devil, and a native hell.
	Unhappy lord! If this be genius, then
	Grant me, O God, a Muse with sober sweep.
	That I may eat and drink with common men,
	Joy with their joys, and with their weeping weep:
	Better to chirp mild loves in lowly bower,
	Than soar through stormy skies, with hatred for my dower.

  “The Balaam of Baron;” “Bard of Corsair;” “The Comus of Poetry;” “Damætas;” “Don José;” “Don Juan;” “A Literary Vassal;” “Lord Glenarvon;” “The Mocking Bird of our Parnassian Ornithology.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Stevenson’s Attwater to Captain Davis, “you seem to me to be a very twopenny pirate!” And to me, Byron with all his pretensions and his fame seems a very twopenny poet and a farthing man…. His letters alone reveal the man; a man of malignant dishonour and declamatory affectation, and poetising conceit; a man who could not even act upon Luther’s advice and “sin boldly,” but must needs advertise his silly obscenities. Despicable, that is the word for him; and it is no Philistine Puritanism that so speaks. The vulgar aristocrat, the insolent plebeian, that Byron was, looks ludicrous by the side of his great contemporaries. Wordsworth, so impassioned, awful, and august; Shelley and Keats; Lamb, the well-beloved, that tragic and smiling patient; miraculous Coleridge; Landor, with his gracious courtesy and Roman wrath; how does Byron show by these? He did one thing well; he rid the world of a cad—by dying as a soldier. There was a strain of greatness in the man, and it predominated at the last.

  Byron and Napoleon are “in the air.” The cause is not far to seek. Ours is an age of co-operation rather than of ascendency; “the individual withers;” and public interest naturally recurs to the overwhelming personalities of the past. Among these there is none more original than Byron. As a meteoric force he was revolutionary; as a “human document” he is at once perplexing and paramount. To understand him aright it is needful to watch the development of his weird character, to get close up to him, both in his works and his letters—which are themselves literature. Such a study has, until now, been rendered extremely difficult by the mass of disordered material and the dearth of digested information. It has, practically, been confined to a few, the chief of whom was Disraeli the younger, eminently qualified, alike by his poetic endowment and by his aristocratic perceptions. In one passage of “Vivian Grey,” throughout “Venetia,” is a real interpretation of Byron’s nature.

  The real original reason of the outcry against Byron was simply that the women made such a ridiculous fuss about him that the men grew jealous, and were not satisfied until he was hounded out of England.

  The more I read in his letters and in the accounts of those who knew him best, the more I am convinced that the popular idea of Byron as a man whose life was bound up in his love affairs, whatever their nature, is the very reverse of the truth: that, on the contrary, his heart was very little concerned in them, and that his strongest emotions were his friendships with men whom he respected, whom he took for his intellectual peers. He seems to me to have longed to be understood, and liked, and affectionately regarded by his men friends with far more real feeling of the heart than is shown in any one of his affairs with women. He took women lightly, just a trifle in the Mohammedan way, and did not really care deeply about them in any other.

Lady Byron

  She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled; which is strange in an heiress, a girl of twenty, a peeress that is to to be in her own right, an only child, and a savante, who has always had her own way. She is a poetess, a mathematician, a metaphysician; yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions and a tenth of her advantages.

	Fare thee well! and if for ever,
	Still for ever, fare thee well;
	Even though unforgiving, never
	’Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Though my many faults defaced me,
	Could no other arm be found,
	Than the one which once embraced me,
	To inflict a cureless wound?

  Lord and Lady Byron are, you know, separated. He said to Rogers that Lady Byron had parted with him, apparently in good friendship, on a visit to her father, and that he had no idea of their being about to part, when he received her decision to that effect. He stated that his own temper, naturally bad, had been rendered more irritable by the derangement of his fortune, and that Lady Byron was entirely blameless. The truth is, he is a very unprincipled fellow.

  Of Lady Byron,—highly informed and accomplished, richly endowed by both nature and fortune, yet dwelling meekly in the shade of retirement,—

	“As mild and patient as the female dove,
	When first her golden couplets are disclos’d;”

bearing with patience her own hard lot, and the published sarcasm of her malignant lord, devoting herself to her superior duties, a blessing to all around by her pious example, and liberal charity,—of her I have neither time nor room to speak as she deserves. Her injuries from him she never did nor will disclose. It should be observed that the most cordial intimacy has always subsisted between her and Mrs. Leigh, the half-sister of Lord Byron.

  Lord Byron’s was a marriage of convenience,—certainly at least on his own part…. He married for money, but of course he wooed with his genius; and the lady persuaded herself that she liked him, partly because he had a genius, and partly because it is natural to love those who take pains to please us. Furthermore, the poet was piqued to obtain his mistress, because she had a reputation for being delicate in such matters; and the lady was piqued to become his wife, not because she did not know the gentleman previously to marriage, but because she did, and hoped that her love and her sincerity, and her cleverness, would enable her to reform him. The experiment was dangerous, and did not succeed…. The “Farewell” that he wrote, and that set so many tender-hearted white handkerchiefs in motion, only resulted from his poetical power of assuming an imaginary position, and taking pity on himself in the shape of another man. He had no love for the object of it, or he would never have written upon her in so different a style afterwards.

  True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation.

  The accounts given me after I left Lord Byron, by the persons in constant intercourse with him, added to those doubts which had before transiently occurred to my mind as to the reality of the alleged disease; and the reports of his medical attendant were far from establishing the existence of anything like lunacy. Under this uncertainty, I deemed it right to communicate to my parents, that, if I were to consider Lord Byron’s past conduct as that of a person of sound mind, nothing could induce me to return to him. It therefore appeared expedient, both to them and myself, to consult the ablest advisers. For that object, and also to obtain still further information respecting the appearances which seemed to indicate mental derangement, my mother determined to go to London. She was empowered by me to take legal opinions on a written statement of mine, though I had then reasons for reserving a part of the case from the knowledge even of my father and mother. Being convinced by the result of these inquiries, and by the tenor of Lord Byron’s proceedings, that the notion of insanity was an illusion, I no longer hesitated to authorize such measures as were necessary in order to secure me from being ever again placed in his power. Conformably with this resolution, my father wrote to him on the 2d of February to propose an amicable separation. Lord Byron at first rejected this proposal; but when it was distinctly notified to him, that, if he persisted in his refusal, recourse must be had to legal measures, he agreed to sign a deed of separation.

  She brought to Lord Byron beauty, manners, fortune, meekness, romantic affection, and every thing that ought to have made her to the most transcendent man of genius—had he been what he should have been—his pride and his idol. I speak not of Lady Byron in the commonplace manner of attesting character; I appeal to the gifted Mrs. Siddons and Joanna Baillie, to Lady Charlemont, and to other ornaments of their sex, whether I am exaggerating in the least when I say, that, in their whole lives, they have seen few beings so intellectual and well-tempered as Lady Byron. I wish to be as ingenuous as possible in speaking of her. Her manner, I have no hesitation to say, is cool at the first interview, but is modestly, and not insolently, cool: she contracted it, I believe, from being exposed by her beauty and large fortune, in youth, to numbers of suitors, whom she could not have otherwise kept at a distance. But this manner could have had no influence with Lord Byron; for it vanishes on nearer acquaintance, and has no origin in coldness. All her friends like her frankness the better for being preceded by this reserve. This manner, however, though not the slightest apology for Lord Byron, has been inimical to Lady Byron in her misfortunes.

  Miss Milbank knew that he was reckoned a rake and a roué; and although his genius wiped off, by impassioned eloquence in love-letters that were felt to be irresistible, or hid the worst stain of that reproach, still Miss Milbank must have believed it a perilous thing to be the wife of Lord Byron…. But still, by joining her life to his in marriage, she pledged her troth, and her faith, and her love, under probabilities of severe, disturbing, perhaps fearful trials in the future…. But I think Lady Byron ought not to have printed that Narrative. Death abrogates not the rights of a husband to his wife’s silence, when speech is fatal … to his character as a man. Has she not flung suspicion over his bones interred, that they are the bones of a—monster?

  Many excellent reasons are given for his being a bad husband; the sum of which is, that he was a very bad man. I confess I was rejoiced then, and am rejoiced now, that he was driven out of England by public scorn; because his vices were not in his passions, but in his principles.

  I have said enough to show him as he was, a thoroughly spoilt man. Lady Byron was equally spoilt in an opposite direction—self-willed, intolerant, jealous, and vindictive. She was a rigid Puritan: they are a brave and undaunted sect in self-reliance on their superiority over all other people, and fear nothing. Saints armed in righteousness prefer doing battle with great sinners, confident of their cause. Lady Byron, with the pertinacity of a zealot, plied the poet with holy texts from Scripture and moral maxims from pious writers…. Any one could live with him excepting an inflexible and dogmatic saint; not that he objected to his wife’s piety, for he saw no harm in that, but her inflicting it on him. The lady’s theory was opposed to this: her mission was to reform him by her example and teaching. She had a smattering of science, mathematics, and metaphysics—a toy pet from her childhood, idolized by her parents, and considered as a phenomenon by her country neighbours.

  Never was a young creature led to the altar more truly as a sacrifice. She was rash, no doubt; but she loved him, and who was not, in the whole business, more rash than she? At the altar she did not know that she was a sacrifice: but before sunset of that winter day she knew it, if a judgment may be formed from her face and attitude of despair when she alighted from the carriage on the afternoon of her marriage-day. It was not the traces of tears which won the sympathy of the old butler who stood at the open door. The bridegroom jumped out of the carriage and walked away. The bride alighted, and came up the steps alone, with a countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair. The old servant longed to offer his arm to the young, lonely creature, as an assurance of sympathy and protection. From this shock she certainly rallied, and soon. The pecuniary difficulties of her new home were exactly what a devoted spirit like hers was fitted to encounter. Her husband bore testimony, after the catastrophe, that a brighter being, a more sympathizing and agreeable companion, never blessed any man’s home. When he afterwards called her cold and mathematical, and over-pious, and so forth, it was when public opinion had gone against him, and when he had discovered that her fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity, might be relied on, so that he was at full liberty to make his part good, as far as she was concerned…. She loved him to the last with a love which it was not in his own power to destroy. She gloried in his fame; and she would not interfere between him and the public who adored him, any more than she would admit the public to judge between him and her. As we have said, her love endured to the last.

  She has been called, after his words, the moral Clytemnestra of her husband. Such a surname is severe: but the repugnance we feel to condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favor of the guilty one of antiquity; for she driven to crime by fierce passion overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more than ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him from the tempests of life. Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand times more cruel than Clytemnestra’s poniard: that only killed the body; whereas Lady Byron’s silence was destined to kill the soul,—and such a soul!—leaving the door open to calumny, and making it to be supposed that her silence was magnanimity destined to cover over frightful wrongs, perhaps even depravity. In vain did he, feeling his conscience at ease, implore some inquiry and examination. She refused, and the only favor she granted was to send him, one fine day, two persons to see whether he were not mad.

  Supposing Mrs. Stowe’s narrative to have been really a “true story,” and that we had meant to reveal the whole of our grandmother’s history, I do not see what defence that is to Mrs. Stowe against the charge of repeating what was told her in a “private, confidential conversation.” But it is not true that Lady Anne Blunt and I ever intended to publish correspondence of the nature mentioned. About three years ago a manuscript in Lady Noel Byron’s handwriting was found among her papers, giving an account of some circumstances connected with her marriage, and apparently intended for publication after her death; but as this seemed not quite certain, no decision as to its publication was come to. In the event of a memoir being written, this manuscript might, perhaps, be included, but hitherto it has not been proposed to publish any other matter about her separation. This statement in Lady Byron’s own handwriting does not contain any accusation of so grave a nature as that which Mrs. Stowe asserts was told her, and Mrs. Stowe’s story of the separation is inconsistent with what I have seen in various letters, &c., of Lady Byron’s…. I, for one, cannot allow that Mrs. Stowe’s statement is substantially correct.

  It appears by Dr. Lushington’s statements, that, when Lady Byron did speak, she had a story to tell that powerfully affected both him and Romilly,—a story supported by evidence on which they were willing to have gone to public trial. Supposing, now, she had imitated Lord Byron’s example, and, avoiding public trial, had put her story into private circulation; as he sent “Don Juan” to fifty confidential friends, suppose she had sent a written statement of her story to fifty judges as intelligent as the two that had heard it; or suppose she had confronted his autobiography with her own,—what would have been the result? The first result would have been Mrs. Leigh’s utter ruin. The world may finally forgive the man of genius anything; but for a woman there is no mercy and no redemption. This ruin Lady Byron prevented by her utter silence and great self-command. Mrs. Leigh never lost position. Lady Byron never so varied in her manner toward her as to excite the suspicions even of her confidential old servant. To protect Mrs. Leigh effectually, it must have been necessary to continue to exclude even her own mother from the secret, as we are assured she did at first; for, had she told Lady Milbanke, it is not possible that so high-spirited a woman could have restrained herself from such outward expressions as would at least have awakened suspicion. There was no resource but this absolute silence.

  If the case is looked at calmly, a simple explanation is not difficult to find. A woman who could ask such a husband in a voice of provoking sweetness “when he meant to give up his bad habit of making verses,” a woman who never lost her temper, never gave up her point, and inflicted the most malignant stabs in the tenderest places with angelic coolness, possessed the power of goading a sensitive, impetuous man to frenzy. She had a maid, for example, to whom Byron entertained a violent aversion, because he suspected her of poisoning his wife’s mind against him. Lady Byron listened to all his furious tirades with unruffled meekness, but never consented to send the woman away. She was quite as jealous of her dignity, quite as resentful of slights, real or supposed, as himself; and in their differences of opinion she had the inestimable advantage of a temper perfectly under control, and a command of all the sweet resignation of a martyr, combined with the most skilful ingenuity of provoking retort. Byron, with his liability to fits of uncontrollable passion, could never have been an easy man to live with; but if his wife had been a loving, warm-hearted woman, with the unconscious tact that such women have, the result would probably have been very different.

Hours of Idleness, 1807

  The poesy of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit. Indeed, we do not recollect to have seen a quantity of verse with so few deviations in either direction from that exact standard. His effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below the level, than if they were so much stagnant water. As an extenuation of this offence, the noble author is peculiarly forward in pleading minority. We have it in the title-page, and on the very back of the volume; it follows his name like a favourite part of his style. Much stress is laid upon it in the preface, and the poems are connected with this general statement of his case, by particular dates, substantiating the age at which each was written. Now, the law upon the point of minority we hold to be perfectly clear. It is a plea available only to the defendant; no plaintiff can offer it as a supplementary ground of action…. Whatever judgment may be passed on the poems of this noble minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, and be content; for they are the last we shall ever have from him…. What right have we poor devils to be nice? We are well off to have got so much from a man of this Lord’s station; who does not live in a garret, but “has the sway” of Newstead Abbey. Again, we say, let us be thankful; and, with honest Sancho, bid God bless the giver, nor look the gift horse in the mouth.

  Yet though there were many, and those not the worst judges, who discerned in these juvenile productions, a depth of thought and felicity of expression which promised much at a more mature age, the errors did not escape the critical lash; and certain brethren of ours yielded to the opportunity of pouncing upon a titled author, and to that which most readily besets our fraternity, and to which we dare not pronounce ourselves wholly inaccessible, the temptation, namely, of shewing our own wit, and entertaining our readers with a lively article without much respect to the feelings of the author, or even to the indications of merit which the work may exhibit.

  The “Hours of Idleness” were poorish and pretentious verses, certainly with less of promise in them than the first productions of most other great poets. Yet they had some, and there was little excuse for the smart but stupid “Edinburgh Review” article upon them. However, this had the good effect of rousing Byron to put forth his power.

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809

  As to the Edinburgh Reviewers, it would indeed require an Hercules to crush the Hydra; but if the author succeeds in merely “bruising one of the heads of the serpent,” though his own hand should suffer in the encounter, he will be amply satisfied.

  If I could envy any man for successful ill-nature, I should envy Lord Byron for his skill in satirical nomenclature.

  It is very abusive; but with few exceptions its satire is as weak as it is violent and unjust.

  A verse pamphlet clearly inspired.

  Is the last angry reverberation of the literary satire of Dryden and Pope. It is a kind of inverted “Dunciad;” and novice falls upon the masters of his day, as the Augustan master upon the nonentities of his, and emulates Pope’s stiletto with a vigorous bludgeon. Only those who, like Rogers or Campbell, in some sort also maintained the tradition of Pope, came off without a gibe. But the invective, though as a rule puerile as criticism, shows extraordinary powers of malicious statement, and bristles with the kind of epigram which makes satire stick, when it is too wildly aimed to wound.

Childe Harold, 1812–16–18

  You have written one of the most delightful poems I ever read…. I have been so fascinated with “Childe Harold,” that I have not been able to lay it down. I would almost pledge my life on its advancing the reputation of your poetical powers, and of its gaining you great honour and regard, if you will do me the credit and favour of attending to my suggestions respecting some alterations and omissions which I think indispensable.

  The Third Canto of “Childe Harold” exhibits, in all its strength and in all its peculiarities, the wild, powerful and original vein of poetry which, in the preceding cantos, first fixed the public attention upon the author. If there is any difference, the former seems to us to have been rather more sedulously corrected and revised for the publication, and the present work to have been dashed from the author’s pen with less regard to the subordinate points of expression and versification. Yet such is the deep and powerful strain of passion, such the original tone and colouring of description, that the want of polish in some of its minute parts rather adds to than deprives the poem of its energy.

  The effect was, accordingly, electric; his fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations, but seemed to spring up, like the palace of a fairy tale, in a night. As he himself briefly described it in his memoranda, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”

  The appearance of this admirable poem placed the author, instantly and forever, at the head of all the poets of his time.

  Byron, who desired to please the public, took care to mix a good deal of tall talk in the most popular of his poems, “Childe Harold.”

  “Childe Harold,” even in its complete form, is no finished whole, no work of art in the higher sense; the requisite repose and depth were wanting alike for the creation and for the enjoyment of such a work. It is a string of pearls of opinions and thoughts on questions of philosophy and politics in a brilliant and highly poetical setting, and what many scarcely ventured to think, they found there set forth in bold and lofty expression. The dissatisfaction, so energetically uttered by the poet, on the part which England played in the affairs of the world, was felt and recognised with especial earnestness by a great part of the nation.

  On taking up a fairly good version of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in French or Italian prose, a reader whose eyes and ears are not hopelessly sealed against all distinction of good from bad in rhythm or in style will infallibly be struck by the vast improvement which the text has undergone in the course of translation. The blundering, floundering, lumbering and stumbling stanzas, transmuted into prose and transfigured into grammar, reveal the real and latent force of rhetorical energy that is in them: the gasping, ranting, wheezing, broken-winded verse has been transformed into really effective and fluent oratory. A ranter, of course, it is whose accents we hear in alternate moan and bellow from the trampled platform of theatrical misanthropy: but he rants no longer out of tune: and we are able to discern in the thick and troubled stream of his natural eloquence whatever of real value may be swept along in company with much drifting rubbish. It is impossible to express how much “Childe Harold” gains by being done out of wretchedly bad metre into decently good prose: the New Testament did not gain more by being translated out of canine Greek into divine English.

  But no English poet has used the Spenserian stanza with the grand vigor with which Byron has used it in his “Childe Harold.” His impetuous spirit imparts a character to the stanza quite distinct from its peculiar Spenserian character. Even the stanzas in which his gentler and more pensive moods are embodied, bear little or no similarity to the manner of Spenser.

  Its cantos, here and there splendidly ablaze with Nature—its storms, its shadows, its serenities; and the sentiment—now morbid, now jubilant—is always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed sounds, or stabs like a knife.

  The demerits of “Childe Harold” lie on the surface; but it is difficult for the modern reader, familiar with the sight, if not the texture, of “the purple patches,” and unattracted, perhaps demagnetized, by a personality once fascinating and always “puissant,” to appreciate the actual worth and magnitude of the poem. We are “o’er informed;” and as with Nature, so with Art, the eye must be couched, and the film of association removed, before we can see clearly. But there is one characteristic feature of “Childe Harold” which association and familiarity have been powerless to veil or confuse—originality of design. “By what accident,” asks the Quarterly Reviewer (George Agar Ellis), “has it happened that no other English poet before Lord Byron has thought fit to employ his talents on a subject so well suited to their display?” The question can only be answered by the assertion that it was the accident of genius which inspired the poet with a “new song.” “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” had no progenitors, and, with the exception of some feeble and forgotten imitations, it has had no descendants.

The Giaour, 1813

  I suppose you have read Lord Byron’s “Giaour,”—and which edition? because there are five, and in every one he adds about fifty lines; so that the different editions have rather the sisterly likeness which Ovid says the Nereids had, than the identity expected by the purchasers of the same work. And pray do you say Lord Byron, or Byron, in defiance of the y and our old friend in Sir Charles Grandison? And do you pronounce Giaour hard g or soft g? And do you understand the poem at first reading?—because Lord Byron and the Edinburgh Reviewers say you are very stupid if you don’t; and yet the same Reviewers have thought proper to prefix the story to help your apprehension. All these, unimportant as you may think them, are matters of discussion here.

  Poured forth for its amusement those Oriental tales, of which “The Giaour” alone retains sufficient vitality or perfume of true poetry to make its perusal at the present day desirable.

  The “Giaour” is, as he truly called it, “a string of passages,” not a work moving by a deep internal law of development to a necessary end; and our total impression from it cannot but receive from this, its inherent defect, a certain dimness and indistinctness. But the incidents of the journey and death of Hassan, in that poem, are conceived and presented with a vividness not to be surpassed; and our impression from them is correspondingly clear and powerful.

The Corsair, 1814

  To me Byron’s “Corsair” appears the best of all his works. Rapidity of execution is no sort of apology for doing a thing ill, but when it is done well, the wonder is so much the greater. I am told he wrote this poem at ten sittings—certainly it did not take him more than three weeks.

  His “Corsair” is marred by classic elegancies: the pirates’ song at the beginning is no truer than a chorus at the Italian opera; his scamps propound philosophical antitheses as balanced as those of Pope. A hundred times ambition, glory, envy, despair, and the other abstract personages, whose images in the time of the Empire the French used to set upon their drawing-room clocks, break in amidst living passions. The noblest passages are disfigured by pedantic apostrophes, and the pretentious poetic diction sets up its threadbare frippery and conventional ornaments. Far worse, he studies effect and follows the fashion.

  Medora’s song in the Corsair, “Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,” though not flawless as a lyric, is one of his most beautiful expressions of this mournful sentiment in a subdued key.

Prisoner of Chillon, 1816

  Next day beautiful drive to Vevay, as you know. After visiting Chillon, where Lord Byron’s name and coat of arms are cut upon Bonnivar’s pillar, I read the poem again, and think it most sublime and pathetic. How can that man have perverted so much feeling as was originally given to him!

  Perhaps the first and most faultless of his poems.

  No one of Byron’s poems is so purely narrative, or has such a unity of lofty and tender interest, uninterrupted by a single distracting image. But this very perfection makes it tame and cold among the heat and animation of the rest: it is the only one in which Byron is left out.

  Detained by bad weather at Ouchy, he wrote in two days “The Prisoner of Chillon,” with its glorious introductory sonnet to Liberty. This tale is a very beautiful composition, having unity, graphic description, tenderness, and pathos.

Manfred, 1817

  There are great faults, it must be admitted, in this poem;—but it is undoubtedly a work of genius and originality. Its worse fault, perhaps, is that it fatigues and overawes us by the uniformity of its terror and solemnity. Another is the painful and offensive nature of the circumstance on which its distress is ultimately founded.

  His [Goethe’s] “Faust” I never read, for I don’t know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me vivá voce, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the “Staubach” and the “Jungfrau,” and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write “Manfred.”

  Last week, le sentiment de malédiction was upon me, about me, within me. I owe that to Lord Byron; I read through his “Manfred,” in English, twice. Never, never shall I be so upset by any thing I read as I was by that. It has fairly made me ill. On Sunday I went out to see the sun set; it was as threatening as the fires of hell. I went into the church where the faithful were peacefully chanting the Hallelujah; I leaned against a pillar, and gazed at them with envy and scorn. I understood why Byron’s Incantation ended thus:—

	“O’er thy heart and brain together
	Hath the word been passed,—now wither!”

In the evening I dined with Edmond; I had to talk with Mrs. Morel about rooms and wall-papers. At nine o’clock I could stand it no longer; I was overcome by bitter, violent despair; my eyes were closed; my head tipped back, and I was consuming my own heart. To the gentle Lydia’s consolations I dropped a few words of grief and irony. Adieu.

  Byron’s tragedy, “Manfred,” was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is in this way so completely formed anew that it would be an interesting task for the critic to point out, not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original; in the course of which I cannot deny that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration. We find thus in this tragedy the quintessence of the most astonishing talent born to be its own tormentor.

  Lord Byron’s “Manfred” is in parts intensely poetical; yet the delicate mind naturally shrinks from the spirit which here and there reveals itself, and the basis on which the drama is built. From a perusal of it we should infer, according to the above theory, that there was right and fine feeling in the poet’s mind, but that the central and consistent character was wanting. From the history of his life we know this to be the fact.

  Into what mediocrity and platitude sinks the “Faust” of Goethe, compared to “Manfred!”

  Byron’s grandest poem is “Manfred.” Henri Taine compares it with “Faust,” and says that “Manfred” is the poem of individuality, and “Faust” the poem of humanity. I should call “Manfred” the poem of sentiment, and “Faust” the poem of ideas; “Manfred” the poem of nature, and “Faust” the poem of history. Both poems represent the disenchantment which is produced within the limits of human existence. Faust himself is weary after having thought, and Manfred after having lived. The one dies, as becomes a German doctor, after having studied medicine, alchemy, the theological sciences and philosophy, and having found them but ashes. The other expires after having felt, struggled, and loved in vain; after having ascended the gigantic ladder formed by the Alps, without finding anything more than the piercing wind eternally moaning, the white frost falling, the pines amid the snow-flakes, the cold desert of crystal fatal to life, the profound abyss where light is extinguished; beneath, men are like insects; above, the eagles fly in endless circles, breaking the immensity and the silence by their cries of hunger; a spectacle which reminds him of another desolation, the moonlight night in which he trod the ground of the Colosseum, the ruins overgrown with nettles, and heard nothing but owls, whose melancholy cries were an elegy over the ashes of the martyrs and gladiators of the past…. Byron feels the evil and Goethe thinks it.

  We read Jeffrey’s awe-stricken applause and Wilson’s enthusiastic appreciation, and find that even such an authority as Goethe declares Manfred’s mouthings of mock despair to be an improvement on Hamlet’s soliloquy, the extraordinary mistake takes away our breath…. The subject is one which only the most exceptional merit in the poetry could make tolerable; and the poetry is not exceptional, but below the highest level of Byron’s power. To compare this diablerie with that of Goethe, or the songs of the spirits whom Manfred evokes, with the melody of Shelley’s responses in the “Prometheus,” is to put him at an extraordinary disadvantage.

Don Juan, 1819–24

  A foul blot on the literature of his country, an act of high treason on English poetry.

  I do most cordially agree with you that I deserve quizzing for refusing to sell “Don Juan,” and should not be spared in the article. The only apology I have to offer to you is this, that it proceeded partly from pique and partly from principle. When the book was published by Murray, I was just on the point of breaking with him. I had not had a letter from him for some months. He sent me copies of the book per mail, without either letter or invoice, so that when I received them I was not disposed to read it with a favourable eye. I did read it, and I declare solemnly to you, much as I admire the talent and genius displayed in it, I never in my life was so filled with utter disgust. It was not the grossness or blackguardism which struck me, but it was the vile, heartless, and cold-blooded way in which this fiend attempted to degrade every tender and sacred feeling of the human heart. I felt such a revolting at the whole book after I had finished it, that I was glad of the excuse I had, from Mr. Murray not writing me, for refusing to sell it. I was terribly laughed at by my friends here, and I daresay you will laugh as much still at my prudery and pique.

  How lamentably the art of versification is neglected by most of the poets of the present day!—by Lord Byron, as it strikes me, in particular, among those of eminence for other qualities. Upon the whole, I think the part of “Don Juan” in which Lambro’s return to his home, and Lambro himself, are described, is the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all I know of Lord B’s. works. The festal abandonment puts one in mind of Nicholas Poussin’s pictures.

  Lord Byron was the assassin of his own fame, and seemed to glory in the deliberate act of assassination…. Replete, it is true, with passages of extraordinary splendour and power, but debased with a far greater proportion of what was vulgar, common-place, and indecent. Latterly, indeed, these cantos became intolerably dull, and found few readers.

  The most prodigal use did not exhaust his powers, nay, seemed rather to increase their vigour. Neither “Childe Harold,” nor any of the most beautiful of Byron’s earlier tales, contain more exquisite morsels of poetry than are to be found scattered through the cantos of “Don Juan,” amidst verses which the author appears to have thrown off with an effort as spontaneous as that of a tree resigning its leaves to the wind.

  I passed some hours over “Don Juan,” and saw no reason to change the opinion which I formed twenty-five years ago. The first two cantos are Byron’s masterpiece. The next two may pass as not below his average. Then begins the descent, and at last he sinks to the level of his own imitators in the Magazines.

  No father would put “Don Juan” into his daughter’s hands; nor would he consent that his son should read it until his principles were fixed, and his judgment clear and defined. It has received its worst condemnation by being reprinted and sold by certain booksellers who deal with the most corrupting literature, and by being found on the bookshelves of the rake and the man of the world. And yet—(“But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!”)—it contains noble poetry, most beautiful passages, and the best literary work that its author in his mature power was capable of.

  The admirable wit both of his letters, and of pieces like the “Vision of Judgment” and “Don Juan,” where wit reaches as high as any English writer has ever carried it.

  The poem, as will be remembered, begins with the meanest and foulest attack on his wife that ever ribald wrote, and put it in close neighborhood with scenes which every pure man or woman must feel to be the beastly utterances of a man who had lost all sense of decency…. Society revolted, however, and fought stoutly against the nauseous dose. Even his sister wrote to him that she heard such things said of it that she never would read it; and the outcry against it on the part of all women of his acquaintance was such that for a time he was quite overborne; and the Countess Guiccioli finally extorted a promise from him to cease writing it. Nevertheless there came a time when England accepted “Don Juan,”—when Wilson, in the Noctes Ambrosianæ, praised it as a classic, and took every opportunity to reprobate Lady Byron’s conduct.

  And then he wrote his masterpiece, “Don Juan.”… There is a derangement of heart and mind in the style of “Don Juan,” as in Swift. When a man jests amidst his tears, it is because he has a poisoned imagination. This kind of laughter is a spasm, and you see in one man a hardening of the heart, or madness; in another, excitement or disgust. Byron was exhausted, at least the poet was exhausted in him. The last cantos of “Don Juan” drag: the gaiety became forced, the escapades became digressions; the reader began to be bored. A new kind of poetry, which he had attempted, had given way in his hands: in the drama he only attained to powerful declamation, his characters had no life; when he forsook poetry, poetry forsook him; he went to Greece in search of action, and only found death.

  In my opinion the poem of “Don Juan” could not have been written by any other author of the present century. The jests and turns which have been stigmatized as so many blots and sins of the author, are essentially portions of the poem, of its nature and character, and could not have been omitted or destroyed, except by radically damaging the poem itself.

  The Immortal, the unprecedented and unrivalled masterpiece.

  A sensitive man, and yet heroic, strong in spirit, but without fixed ideals of life, a rebel by nature who yet finds no greater soul to lead him, no faithful band to follow him in any definite effort for mankind, Byron is a modern likeness of him that in the legend afterwards became St. Christopher. Only Byron seeks the strongest without finding him, learns to despise the devil, and never meets the devil’s master. Worn out with the search, the poet flings himself down in the woods of doubt and dreams “Don Juan.” We look in vain for the right adjective with which to qualify this poem: it is so full of strength, so lavish of splendid resources, and yet in sum so disappointing. It has no true ending, and never could have had one. It is a mountain stream, plunging down dreadful chasms, singing through grand forests, and losing itself in a lifeless gray alkali desert. Here is romantic self-criticism pushed to its farthest consequences. Here is the self-confession of an heroic soul that has made too high demands on life, and that has found in its own experience and in the world nothing worthy of true heroism.

  He could exhibit only two squeaking and disjointed puppets: there is, as far as I can remember, just one passage in the whole range of his writings which shows any power of painting any phase of any kind of character at all: and this is no doubt a really admirable (if not wholly original) instance of the very broadest comedy—the harangue addressed by Donna Julia to her intruding husband.

  Some of Byron’s most powerful writing is found in “Don Juan;” some of his tenderest; and the possible flexibility of the English language is often fully realized. But when he wrote this poem, his better nature was more or less eclipsed; but wherever it asserts itself, we feel its presence in the moulding of the verse, as much as we do in the sentiments expressed.

  If a novel in verse is a novel all the same, where is better reading (given liberty to skip when you like) than in “Don Juan?”

Marino Faliero, 1820

  “Marino Faliero,” has, we believe, been pretty generally pronounced a failure by the public voice, and we see no reason to call for a revision of their sentence. It contains, beyond all doubt, many passages of commanding eloquence and some of genuine poetry, and the scenes, more particularly, in which Lord Byron has neglected the absurd greed of his pseudo-Hellenic writers, are conceived and elaborated with great tragic effect and dexterity. But the subject is decidedly ill-chosen. In the main tissue of the plot and in all the busiest and most interesting parts of it, it is, in fact, no more than another “Venice Preserved,” in which the author has had to contend (nor has he contended successfully) with our recollections of a former and deservedly popular play on the same subject.

  Notwithstanding his predominant personality, has sometimes had the power of renouncing himself altogether, as may be seen in some of his dramatic pieces, particularly in his “Marino Faliero.” In this piece one quite forgets that Lord Byron, or even an Englishman, wrote it. We live entirely in Venice, and entirely in the time in which the action takes place.

  A composition that abounds in noble passages and rests on a fine and original conception of character.

  “Marino Faliero,” one of Byron’s less important works, may be cited as a fair example of his eloquence and concentrated passion. The theme of the drama is perfectly simple,—the conflict in Marino’s breast between aristocratic pride and the love of liberty (predominant characteristics, be it observed, of the poet himself): and about this conflict the whole action of the play revolves, without any minor issues to dissipate the effect. The mind is held gripped to one emotion and one thought; we seem to hear the mighty pleading of a Demosthenes. There is no poem of Shelley’s (with the possible exception of “The Cenci,” where he resorts to monstrous and illegitimate means) which begins to leave on the mind so distinct and powerful an impression as this, yet the whole drama contains perhaps not a single line of the illusive charm to be found in passages on every page of Shelley’s works.

Cain, 1821

  “Cain, a Mystery,” was worse and worse. Byron dared to measure himself with Milton, and came off as poorly as Belial might have done from a contest with Michael. Crude metaphysics, as old as the hills, and as barren—bald, thread-bare blasphemies, and puerile ravings, formed the staple of the piece. The only tolerable touches, those of domestic love and the like, were visibly borrowed from Gesner’s “Death of Abel:” and in short, one of the most audacious of all the insults that have ever been heaped upon the faith and feelings of a Christian land, was also one of the most feeble and ineffectual. Thank God! Cain was abandoned to the Radicals—and thank God, it was too radically dull to be popular even among them.

  Though it abounds in beautiful passages, and shows more power perhaps than any of the author’s dramatical compositions, we regret very much that it should ever have been published. It will give great scandal and offence to pious persons in general—and may be the means of suggesting the most painful doubts and distressing perplexities, to hundreds of minds that might never otherwise have been exposed to such dangerous disturbance.

  1 said that I had lately been reading Byron’s “Cain,” and had been particularly struck by the third act, and the manner in which the murder is brought about. “It is, indeed, admirable,” said Goethe. “Its beauty is such as we shall not see a second time in the world.” “Cain,” said I, “was at first prohibited in England; but now everybody reads it, and young English travellers usually carry a complete Byron with them.” “It was folly,” said Goethe; “for, in fact, there is nothing in the whole of ‘Cain’ which is not taught by the English bishops themselves.”

  Like a lion impatiently beating against the iron bars of his cage, so Byron precipitates himself in this poem on the mysteries of revealed faith. He never, indeed, succeeds in bursting his cage; rather he remains in a state of indecision, and never comes to a positive conclusion in either direction. To Englishmen this scepticism was, with few exceptions, an insurmountable stone of offence. In England freedom of action is cramped by the want of freedom in thought; the converse is the case with us Germans, freedom of thought is restricted by the want of freedom in action. To us this scepticism presents nothing in the least degree fearful; we, like Faust, are afraid neither of the devil nor of hell.

  “Cain” is the most complete and finished work of the poet, and we cannot contradict Shelley when he calls it the greatest of Byron’s poems. Cain is a Titanic Manfred, a creation similar to Job and Prometheus. The spirit of Æschylus seems to breath in the poem, and with the exception of a few passages in “Paradise Lost” and in “Faust,” modern poetry has produced nothing similar in boldness and in grandeur to Cain’s flight with Lucifer through illimitable space, and the conversations of the two in Hades. In England the poem was appreciated by few at first, and Byron called it jestingly “the Waterloo of his popularity.” But it is an æsthetic truth that the creation of Satan in “Cain” must be considered as one of the greatest achievements of modern poetry. There are altogether only four poets who have succeeded in portraying Satan: Vandel, Milton, Goethe, and Byron. Vandel’s satan was created fourteen years before that of Milton; it is a powerful conception, and undoubtedly the greatest poetical figure which Holland has produced. Goethe’s Mephisto is such a peculiar impersonation of the Satanic idea that he cannot be compared to the others. Byron’s Satan ranks next to Milton’s. Dante’s detailed delineation only produces a somewhat ridiculous monster which leaves us perfectly indifferent, while Milton’s and Byron’s Satan is a colossal extension of the human form surrounded by a darkness as of thunder-clouds, and exciting our terror as well as a feeling of sympathy.

  It may be true, Basrandes observes, that in Cain, Byron is dashing about like a wild beast in the cage of dogma; it may be true that this poem is simply an expression of man’s monotonous fate in this world; but the power of personal force, the strength of the individual’s will, must have been an inspiring influence to that younger generation whose fate it was to stand firm against the efforts of the Holy Alliance to crush out the spirit of liberty. Certainly the poem is another revelation of that fierce assertion of self-sufficiency which enabled Byron, in the later days, to take up the heritage of leadership left him by Rousseau.

Letters

  The Letters, at least those which were sent from Italy, are among the best in our language. They are less affected than those of Pope and Walpole; they have more matter in them than those of Cowper. Knowing that many of them were not written merely for the person to whom they were directed, but were general epistles, meant to be read by a large circle, we expected to find them clever and spirited, but deficient in ease. We looked with vigilance for instances of stiffness in the language, and awkwardness in the transitions. We have been agreeably disappointed; and we must confess, that if the epistolary style of Lord Byron was artificial, it was a rare and admirable instance of that highest art which cannot be distinguished from nature.

  His letters from Italy, alone,—things thrown off in every variety of mood, and some of them bearing strong evidence of the bottle,—display more genius than can be found in all the first two cantos of “Childe Harold.”

  We are indebted to the poet’s misfortune for all that series of delightful letters which in themselves form one of the most perfect biographies, and which reflect the whole contemporary life like the literary correspondence of Grimm. A slender thread of criticism and by-play links them together in Moore’s Life, and with this are blended corollary recollections of observers and travellers, critics, and intimates; never, however, obscuring the splendid figure of the chief actor, embellishing his surroundings like living coulisses, shifting or shoving in landscapes or backgrounds, stories, and scenes, and throwing right upon him as he stands in the centre of the stage the whole affluence of their light. There is no better illuminated figure on the whole canvas of history. Turning to the memoirs of this man is like walking down a corridor of the Louvre, where the Pagan mythology shimmers before us in marble, and far at the end, queen-like and alone, stands the Venus of Milo. Turn down what corridor you will, an excess of illumination falls upon the head of Byron; it is cloudless save for one great cloud; it is put to the torture of endless light: it is the story of Regulus and the Carthaginian sun; it is the glare of the dog-star upon the bald ruins of the Parthenon.

General

  Byron, with eager indifference.

  His verse, with all its lofty aspirations and endowments, is lost in the mazes of infidelity and despair; groping in a vast crowd of strange unearthly shapes conjured up by midnight fancy, it deifies only a morbid heroism, which it invests with the gloomy spell of varied passion. This atheistic inspiration was not altogether alien to German poetry at an earlier epoch; but a purer sphere was soon attained, the monstrosities of false tragic grandeur being banished to the extreme confines of the drama. In the higher regions of art it was speedily discovered that modern poetry cannot flow in transparent stream from the turbid eddy of forward passion; but founded on eternal hope, it must become a glorified admixture of Faith and Love, radiant as the rainbow after the storm, or the dawn of morn after the shades of night.

  “Parisina,” is the most interesting and best conceived and best told story I ever read. I was never more affected.

  He has not the variety of Scott—nor the delicacy of Campbell—nor the absolute truth of Crabbe—nor the polished sparkling of Moore; but in force of diction, and inextinguishable energy of sentiment, he clearly surpasses them all.

  Lord Byron is a splendid and noble egotist.—He visits Classical shores; roams over romantic lands, and wanders through magnificent forests; courses the dark and restless waves of the sea, and rocks his spirit on the midnight lakes; but no spot is conveyed to our minds, that is not peopled by the gloomy and ghastly feelings of one proud and solitary man. It is as if he and the world were the only two things which the air clothed.—His lines are majestic vanities;—his poetry always is marked with a haughty selfishness;—he writes loftily, because he is the spirit of an ancient family;—he is liked by most of his readers, because he is a Lord. If a common man were to dare to be as moody, as contemptuous, and as misanthropical, the world would laugh at him. There must be a coronet marked on all his little pieces of poetical insolence, or the world would not countenance them.

  What, then, should be said of those for whom the thoughtlessness and inebriety of wanton youth can no longer be pleaded, but who have written in sober manhood, and with deliberate purpose?—men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and, hating that revealed religion, which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic School; for, though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterized by a satanic pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.

	The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
	Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
	An early but enduring monument,
	Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
	In sorrow.

  It seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron’s verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in rerum naturâ?

	Even I—albeit I’m sure I did not know it,
	Nor sought of foolscap subjects to be king—
	Was reckon’d a considerable time,
	The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.

  He has filled a leaf in the book of fame, but it is a very blotted leaf.

  There are things in Byron’s poetry so exquisite, that fifty or five hundred years hence, they will be read, felt, and adored throughout the world…. No, no! give me Byron, with all his spite, hatred, depravity, dandyism, vanity, frankness, passion, and idleness, to Wordsworth, with all his heartless communion with woods and grass.

  Lord Byron is to be regarded as a man, as an Englishman, and as a great talent. His good qualities belong chiefly to the man, his bad to the Englishman and the peer, his talent is incommensurable…. He is a great talent, a born talent, and I never saw the true poetical power greater in any man than in him. In the apprehension of external objects, and a clear penetration into past situations, he is quite as great as Shakspeare. But as a pure individuality, Shakspeare is his superior. This was felt by Byron, and on this account, he does not say much of Shakspeare, although he knows whole passages by heart. He would willingly have denied him altogether; for Shakspeare’s cheerfulness is in his way, and he feels that he is no match for it. Pope he does not deny, for he had no cause to fear him. On the contrary, he mentions him, and shews him respect when he can, for he knows well enough that Pope is a mere foil to himself.

  We ought too to look back with late repentance & remorse on our intoxicated praise, now cooling, of Lord Byron—such a man to be so spoken of when the world possessed Goethe, Schiller, Shelley!

  Byron—good generous hapless Byron! And yet when he died he was only a Kraftmann (Powerman as the Germans call them). Had he lived he would have been a poet.

  As a poet, he stands among the most eminent that England has ever produced. Few, indeed (and, among those who live, we may say, fearless of contradiction, none), have possessed at the same time an energy and intellectual grasp like his, together with his facility and gracefulness.

  Byron seems to me deficient in feeling. Professor Wilson, I think, used to say that “Beppo” was his best poem; because all his faults were there brought to a height.

	With joint acclaim
	Let’s hail the name
	Of our great Bard, whose mighty fame
	Must spread for aye,
	Ne’er to decay
	Till heaven and earth shall pass away.

	He, from above descending, stooped to touch
	The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though
	It scarce deserved his verse.

  Byron has been extolled as the sublimest of poets. There are passages in all his poems which I have thought charming, but mixed with so much that was disgusting that I never believed his popularity would be lasting. His versification is so destitute of sustained harmony, many of his thoughts are so strained, his sentiments so unamiable, his misanthropy so gloomy, his images so grossly indelicate, his libertinism so shameless, his merriment such grinning of a ghastly smile, that I have always believed his verses would soon rank with forgotten things…. This person has now been seven years dead, and the public interest in him has not abated. He was one of the wonders of his age, and was, like Napoleon Bonaparte, the torso of a Hercules. A “grand homme manqué”—a club-footed Apollo—in mind as in person. There are sublime and beautiful passages of detail in his poetry; and if he had finished his “Don Juan” it would have been a worthy companion to Voltaire’s “Pucelle,” in the Temple of Cloacina upon the summit of Parnassus.

  With Byron’s own works in one’s hand his character cannot possibly be a riddle to anybody. I dare say the devil may sometimes be painted blacker than he is; but Byron has a fancy for the character of Lucifer, and seems to me, on the contrary, tres pauvre diable…. Nobody was ever a more fanatical worshipper of his poetry than I was: time was that I devoured his verses (poison as they were to me) like “raspberry tarts;” I still know, and remember with delight, their exquisite beauty and noble vigor, but they don’t agree with me. And, without knowing anything of his religious doubts or moral delinquencies, I cannot at all agree with Mr. Moore that upon the showing of his own works Byron was a “good man.”

  Byron was a paradox in every thing. He was at once a cold-blooded satirist and a man of sentiment; an aristocrat and a radical; a Platonist and an Epicurean; the most sublime and the most sensual of mortals; “half dust, half deity,” to borrow his own phrase; but the most barefaced paradox, was his ostentatious defence in prose of Pope’s poetical system, which, in his poetry, he had been all his life endeavoring to subvert. The key to Byron’s eccentricities is to be found in his total want of principle, and his uncontrollable passions. To the last is to be referred, moreover, much of what is grand and striking in his poetry. Many were led to charge him with affectation. The history of his life, however, which may be called passion put into action, shows how uniformly he sacrificed to his passions all his worldly interests and better hopes. His poetry gains somewhat in effect by our conviction of this, for sincerity is essential to the full success of the poet as of the orator; and, in this point of view, the exhibition of actual vice is less detrimental to his interest than the affectation of it. Much stress has been laid on the mischievous tendency of Byron’s philosophy. But, in truth, there is little in his writings to deserve that name. He had no principles to build on, and seems to have been incapable of forming any settled system, or even a systematic attack on any thing. He levelled his shafts pretty indiscriminately at whatever men prize most in this life, or look forward to with hope in the next. This sort of random aim was little better than shooting in the dark.

  No modern author who can lay claim to the highest honors of Parnassus has written a greater quantity of perishable, perishing rhyme, than the noblest of them all.

  Byron’s “Heaven and Earth,”… is full of passages which none but he could have written; and it also affords some instances of the facility with which the noble bard could extract honey from any flower, or weed, however humble.

  Lord Byron has abundance of wit, and extremely diversified wit, but of a kind that agitates and has a baneful influence. He has read Voltaire, and he frequently imitates him. In following the great English poet step by step, we are forced to acknowledge that he aims at effect, that he rarely loses sight of himself, that he is almost always in attitude; that he looks at himself with complacency; but the affectation of eccentricity, singularity, originality, belongs to the English character in general. If, however, Lord Byron has atoned for his genius by certain foibles, futurity will not concern itself about such paltry matters, or rather it will know nothing about them; the poet will hide the man, and will interpose talent between the man and future generations: through this divine veil posterity will discern nothing but the god.

  Byron and Goethe—the two names that predominate, and, come what may, ever will predominate, over our every recollection of the fifty years that have passed away. They rule;—the master-minds, I might almost say the tyrants, of a whole period of poetry; brilliant, yet sad; glorious in youth and daring, yet cankered by the worm i’ the bud, despair. They are the two Representative Poets of two great schools; and around them we are compelled to group all the lesser minds which contributed to render the era illustrious. The qualities which adorn and distinguish their works are to be found, although more thinly scattered, in other poets their contemporaries; still theirs are the names that involuntarily rise to our lips whenever we seek to characterise the tendencies of the age in which they lived…. The day will come when Democracy will remember all that it owes to Byron. England too, will, I hope, one day remember the mission—so entirely English, yet hitherto overlooked by her—which Byron fulfilled on the Continent; the European rôle given by him to English literature, and the appreciation and sympathy for England which he awakened amongst us. Before he came, all that was known of English literature was the French translation of Shakespeare, and the anathema hurled by Voltaire against the “intoxicated barbarian.” It is since Byron that we Continentalists have learned to study Shakespeare and other English writers. From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst us for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so worthily represented among the oppressed. He led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe.

	And poor, proud Byron, sad as grave
	And salt as life; forlornly brave,
	And quivering with the dart he drave.

  Few poets excel him in the instantaneous sympathy he creates, even among minds having no natural affinity with his own. He is eminently the poet of passion. In almost all the changes of his mood, the same energy of feeling glows in his verse. The thought or emotion uppermost in his mind at any one time, whether it be bad or good, seems to sway, for the moment, all the faculties of his nature. He has a passionate love for evil, a passionate love for nature, for goodness, for beauty, and, we may add, a passionate love for himself. When he sits in the place of the scoffer, his words betray the same inspiration from impulse,—the same passion, though condensed into bitterness and mockery.

  In Byron there is much to admire but nothing to imitate: for energy is beyond the limits of imitation. Byron could not have written better than he did. Altho’ he seems negligent in many places, he was very assiduous in correcting his verses. His poetry took the bent of a wayward and perverted mind often weak, but oftener perturbed. Tho’ hemp and flax and cotton are the stronger for being twisted, verses and intellects certainly are not…. It is unfortunate that Ariosto did not attract him (Byron) first. Byron had not in his nature amenity enough for it, and chose Berni in preference, and fell from Berni to Casti. But his scorching and dewless heat burnt up their flowery meadows.

  Lord Byron is altogether in my affection again…. I have read on to the end, and am quite sure of the great qualities which the last ten or fifteen years had partially obscured. Only a little longer life and all would have been gloriously right again. I read this book of Moore’s too long ago; but I always retained my first feeling for Byron in many respects,… the interest in the places he had visited, in relics of him. I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were condensed into the little China bottle yonder, after the Rosicrucian fashion … they seem to “have their reward” and want nobody’s love or faith. Just one of those trenchant opinions which I found fault with Byron for uttering,—as “proving nothing!”

  Ever so unfortunate, a man’s folding his hands over it in melancholy mood, and suffering himself to be made a puppet by it, is a sadly weak proceeding. Most thoughtful men have probably some dark fountains in their souls, by the side of which, if there were time, and it were decorous, they could let their thoughts sit down and wail indefinitely. That long Byron wail fascinated men for a time, because there is that in human nature.

  The truth is, that what has put Byron out of favour with the public of late, is not his faults, but his excellencies. His artistic good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug, above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligible; these are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerizing, table-turning, spirit-rapping, Spiritualizing, Romanizing generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism. The age is an effeminate one; and it can well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that of the sturdy peer, proud of his bull-neck and his boxing, who keeps bears and bull-dogs, drilled Greek ruffians at Missolonghi, and “had no objection to a pot of beer;” and who might, if he had reformed, have made a gallant English gentleman.

  It was not until the “Siebengebirge” or Seven Mountains rose to view, that the glories of the Rhine were revealed in all their matchless grandeur. No description I have ever read approaches the reality, save the verses of the most impassioned of poets. How wonderfully, how truthfully, has Byron pictured in glowing words the beauty of scenery which meets the eye on every side.

  Had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of his day.

  Byron, doubtless, is no ordinary bard. He possesses fecundity, eloquence, wit. Yet these very qualities are confined within pretty narrow limits. The wit of “Beppo” and of “Don Juan” is of the kind that consists in dissonance; that is to say, in the serio-comic, in an apparent gravity which is contradicted every moment by drollery of phrase. In the same way Byron’s fecundity is more apparent than real. He wrote a great deal—poems serious and poems comic, epics and dramas, visions and satires; but, speaking strictly, he never had more than a single subject—himself. No man has ever pushed egotism farther than he.

  This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and while it is no hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his time, he was only half conscious of this, if indeed he did not always inwardly shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as so many strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy and perpetual self-assertion. Conceit and presumption have not been any more fatal to the world, than the waste which comes of great men failing in their hearts to recognise how great they are.

  The genius of Byron was of a more vigorous mould than that of Keats; but notwithstanding his great popularity and the number of his imitators at one time, he made a less permanent impression on the character of English poetry. His misanthropy and gloom, his scoffing vein, and the fierceness of his animosities, after the first glow of admiration was over, had a repellant effect upon readers, and made them turn to more cheerful strains.

  Byron will be remembered longer by the lyrical pearls, which are scattered so copiously through his poems, gems which are familiar to every reader of his works, and can never be forgotten. It is in these that his muse takes her noblest flight; these are the portions of his poetry which are instinct with the most exquisite beauty, and exercise on us the most powerful spell; and we cannot imagine, that they will ever fail to fill their readers with rapture…. In Germany, Byron, like almost all English poets, found a second fatherland. His influence on our literature was confined indeed to one period only, nor has his poetry been interwoven, like Shakespeare’s, for ever with our own; but if limited in duration, it was widely propagated and intense during its reign.

  His ideas were banned during his life; it has been attempted to depreciate his genius since his death. To this day English critics are unjust to him. He fought all his life against the society from which he came; and during his life, as after his death, he suffered the pain of the resentment which he provoked, and the repugnance to which he gave rise. A foreign critic may be more impartial, and freely praise the powerful hand whose blows he has not felt. If ever there was a violent and madly sensitive soul, but incapable of being otherwise; ever agitated, but in an enclosure without issue; predisposed to poetry by its innate fire, but limited by its natural barriers to a single kind of poetry,—it was Byron’s…. All styles appear dull, and all souls sluggish by the side of his…. No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination; he could not metamorphose himself into another. They are his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which, hardly transformed and modified, he introduces into his verses. He does not invent, he observes; he does not create, he transcribes.

  The youth thus strangely educated, had at least one fountain of inspiration—the Bible. The study of the Prophets invigorated the poetic character of his nature. Their rugged genius is visible in some of his works, severe and steady as the simoom, monotonous as the desert, but solemn as immensity, and sublime as the idea of the Almighty; their semitical genius, expressed by Isaiah in his admirable works, is reproduced by Michael Angelo in the majestic features of his Moses, whose venerable beard, descending to his breast, seems to be stirred by the breezes of Sinai.

  The great thing in Byron is genius, that quality so perilous to define, so evanescent in its aroma, so impossible to mistake. If ever a man breathed whom we recognize (athwart much poor and useless work, when strictly tested) as emphatically the genius, that man was Byron; and, if ever genius made poetry its mouthpiece, covering with its transcendent utterances a multitude of sins whether against art or against the full stature of perfect manhood, Byron’s is that poetry.

  How to make a Satanic Poem like the late Lord Byron. Take a couple of fine deadly sins; and let them hang before your eyes until they become racy. Then take them down, dissect them, and stew them for some time in a solution of weak remorse; after which they are to be devilled with mock-despair.

  Byron is probably the greatest poet that Britain has produced since the days of Dryden. He is, perhaps, the most thorough master of words that ever lived. His most beautiful passages bear comparison with the noblest poetry in the language; and his longest poems, full of faults as they are, are magnificent monuments to his genius.

  The refrain of Carlyle’s advice during the most active years of his criticism was, “Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe.” We do so, and find that the refrain of Goethe’s advice in reference to Byron is—“Nocturnâ versate manu, versate diurnâ.” He urged Eckermann to study English, that he might read him; remarking, “A character of such eminence has never existed before, and probably will never come again…. The English may think of him as they please; this is certain, they can show no (living) poet who is to be compared to him.”… Dr. Elze ranks the author of “Harold” and “Juan” among the four greatest English poets, and claims for him the intellectual parentage of Lamartine and Musset, in France, of Espronceda, in Spain; of Puschkin, in Russia; with some modifications, of Heine, in Germany, of Berchet and others in Italy. So many voices of so various countries cannot be simply set aside: unless we wrap ourselves in an insolent insularism, we are bound at least to ask what is the meaning of their concurrent testimony…. We may learn much from him still, when we have ceased to disparage, as our fathers ceased to idolize, a name in which there is so much warning and so much example.

  Wordsworth has an insight into permanent sources of joy and consolation for mankind which Byron has not; his poetry gives us more which we may rest upon than Byron’s,—more which we can rest upon now, and which men may rest upon always. I place Wordsworth’s poetry, therefore, above Byron’s, on the whole, although in some points he was greatly Byron’s inferior, and although Byron’s poetry will always, probably, find more readers than Wordsworth’s, and will give pleasure more easily. But these two, Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and preëminent in actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century.

  It is by the vast strength and volume of his powers, rather than by any one perfect work, that he is to be estimated. He does not seem to have had any delicacy of ear for the refinements of metre, or to have studied the intricacies of it. But, when the impulse came, he poured himself forth with wonderful rapidity, home-thrusting directness, and burning eloquence—eloquence that carries you over much that is faulty in structure, and imperfect, or monotonous in metre. He himself did not stay to consider the way he said things, so intent was he on the things he had to say. Neither any more does the reader. His cadences were few, but they were strong and impressive, and carried with them, for the time, every soul that heard them.

  In early boyhood he had been possessed by Byron’s poetry, but he could not read it in later life, except perhaps “The Vision of Judgment,” and parts of “Childe Harold,” and of “Don Juan.” He would say: “Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality: he is endlessly clever, and is now unduly depreciated.”

  Has stirred England more deeply than any other poet since the earlier years of the seventeenth century, who has influenced human kind outside England more widely and profoundly than any writer of our literature, and who, in whatever else of his aspirations he failed, will be found in the slowly moving ages to have achieved his ambition to be “remembered in his line with his land’s language.”

  The glory of Scott was the last red tints of a setting sun, and the glory of Wordsworth the first mild radiance of a rising moon, when Byron came like a comet, and paled their ineffectual fires.

  It is remarkable that the influence of Byron’s poetry has been far greater on the Continent than it has been in England. No English poet, except Shakespeare, has been so much read or so much admired by foreigners. His works, or parts of them, have been translated into many European languages, and numerous foreign writers have been affected by their ideas and style. The estimate that has been formed of them is extraordinarily high. Charles Nodier said: “The appearance of Lord Byron in the field of European literature is one of those events the influence of which is felt by all peoples and through all generations;” and his judgment in this respect by no means stands alone. The chief reason of this, independently of the splendour of his compositions, is to be found in his political opinions. Byron’s poetry, like that of most of his English contemporaries—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Shelley—was the outcome of the French Revolution; but whereas the three first-named of these poets, disgusted with the excesses of that movement, went over into the opposite camp, and the idealism of Shelley was too far removed from the sphere of practical politics to be a moving force, Byron became, almost unintentionally, the apostle of the principles which it represented…. Thus his writings became a political power throughout Europe, and more so on the Continent than in England, in proportion as the loss of liberty was more keenly felt by foreign nations. Wherever aspirations for independence arose, Byron’s poems were read and admired.

  Byron wrote, as easily as a hawk flies, and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in the precisely narrowest terms; not only the exact truth, but the most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure Byron’s greater powers at that time than I could Turner’s; but I saw that both were right in all things that I knew right from wrong in; and that they must henceforth be my masters, each in his own domain.

  Perhaps the most powerful factor in Byron’s poetical genius is his style. Alone among his contemporaries he understood how to swell the stream of English poetical diction as it had come down to him from the eighteenth century, so as to make it an adequate vehicle of expression for romantic thought and feeling. Wordsworth speaks the language of philosophers, Shelley of spirits, but Byron of men.

	May all the devastating force be spent?
	Or all thy godlike energies lie shent?
	Nay! thou art founded in the strength Divine:
	The Soul’s immense eternity is thine!
	Profound Beneficence absorbs thy power,
	While Ages tend the long-maturing flower:
	Our Sun itself, one tempest of wild flame,
	For source of joy, and very life men claim
	In mellowing corn, in bird, and bloom of spring,
	In leaping lambs, and lovers dallying.
	Byron! the whirlwinds rended not in vain;
	Aloof behold they nourish and sustain!
	In the far end we shall account them gain.

  The tragic power of Crabbe is as much above the reach of Byron as his singularly vivid though curiously limited insight into certain shades of character.

  The genius of Byron was not one from which we might have expected good sonnet-work. He is greater in mass than in detail, in outlines than in delicate side-touches—in a word, he is like a sculptor who hews a Titan out of a huge block, one whom we would never expect to be able, or to care, to delicately carve a canoe. That Byron could write sonnets, and that he could even write an exceptionally fine one, is evident from that which I have quoted.

  The next influence on my mind was that of Byron, and his power over me was much increased by the injudicious and unjust hostility of one of my tutors, who hated Byron as the clergy hated him during his lifetime. My tutor was always expressing contempt for the poet, whose works he had not read and was incompetent to appreciate. This only made me read them more and think them more magnificent than ever. At this day I am not aware that Byron ever exercised any bad influence over me. His gloom, which was in great part unreal, did not prove to be infectious in my case, but his clear, direct, and manly use of the English language was very valuable as a part of education. As to his immorality, it was more in his life than in his writings, and his enemies made the most of it whilst they tolerated without protest the immoralities of more favoured authors.

  His style is remarkable for its strength and elasticity, for its immensely powerful sweep, tireless energy, and brilliant illustrations.

  Which is the better and stronger is a question that can hardly be determined now. It is certain that Byron’s star has waned, and that Wordsworth’s has waxed; but it is also certain that there are moments in life when the “Ode to Venice” is almost as refreshing and as precious as the ode on the “Intimations,” and when the epic mockery of “Don Juan” is to the full as beneficial as the chaste philosophy of “The Excursion” and the “Ode to Duty.”

  The loose, the ungrammatical.

  Now, at least two or three of these had great genius; Shelley and Villon especially set a lasting fascination in their works, and although Byron does not wear so well, he compels a slowly relaxing attention as he retreats in the romantic distance.

  Wordsworth tried the moral lesson and spoiled some of his best work with botany and the Bible. A good many smaller men than he have tried the same thing since, and have failed. Perhaps “Cain” and “Manfred” have taught the human heart more wisdom than “Matthew” or the unfortunate “idiot boy” over whom Byron was so mercilessly merry. And yet Byron probably never meant to teach any one anything in particular, and Wordsworth meant to teach everybody, including and beginning with himself.

  One poet, and one alone, of that great early group, can to-day reach our affections through our amusement. If Byron lives, he lives by virtue of wit. The sorrowful recklessness of his irony bears the stamp of living power, unknown to his heroics or his sentimental tears. Byron alone among his comrades is great as a humorist; for alone among his comrades he was a realist. What he saw was doubtless often unworthy; but it had the merit of existing.

  Poor Byron showed in his life the struggle for good as well as evil, even if the evil predominated. He had so nursed his weaknesses and enjoyed a selfish indulgence in all coveted experiences, with no detaining hand or gentle voice to draw him back, that his passions, prejudices, and viciousness overcame him. He was a wanderer over the land, with a “might have been.” There is little doubt that Byron deeply loved Mary Chaworth, and when fate placed her beyond his reach, his whole future was embittered, and he had not the strength of character to rise above it. He was defiant, with a will that could not be forced…. The originality of his conceptions, the vigor of his thoughts, the boldness of his imagination, together with beauty and sublime harmony, stand to-day unrivalled.

  Byron’s landscape style resembles that of Scott in its direct painting, in its rapid motion, but, as a rule, with very superior though very unequal power. In fact, to digress for a moment, perhaps no English poet has equaled Byron, whether in his grasp and sweep of subject, his free sympathy with mankind, or in what we might call his initial force. In narrative, how straight to the mark does his energy go, compared with the bewildering discursiveness of the “Revolt of Islam,” or “Endymion,” the tortuous progress, never ending, still beginning, of the “Ring and the Book!” In this movement, this directness of power, and here only, Byron’s style was doubtless affected by Scott…. Even in his early lines it is impossible not to recognise the hand of a mighty master—unless indeed we are enslaved and bound to limit our taste by partisan favouritism and coterie decrees: as if Parnassus could not afford space for many styles;—or as if a man should worship crimson and therefore despise blue…. When successful, his work retains its original freshness, its stimulating power, its largeness of sentiment, its humanity veiled under cynicism. What has been condemned as mere calculated and spurious sensibility was, in truth, the clumsy turbid expression of genuine feeling, by an artist who could rarely put in his deepest, finest tints with success—who had little command of gradation…. Byron’s love of landscape was a passion, deep and sincere perhaps as that of any poet.

  Byron, then, seems to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of imitation, of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold. He is not indeed an impostor; for his sense of the beauty of nature and of the unsatisfactoriness of life is real, and his power of conveying this sense to others is real also. He has great, though uncertain, and never very fine, command of poetic sound, and a considerable though less command of poetic vision. But in all this there is a singular touch of illusion, of what his contemporaries had learnt from Scott to call gramarye. The often cited parallel of the false and true Florimels in Spenser applies here also. The really great poets do not injure each other in the very least by comparison, different as they are. Milton does not “kill” Wordsworth; Spenser does not injure Shelley; there is no danger in reading Keats immediately after Coleridge. But read Byron in close juxtaposition with any of these, or with not a few others, and the effect, to any good poetic taste, must surely be disastrous; to my own, whether good or bad, it is perfectly fatal. The light is not that which never was on land or sea; it is that which is habitually just in front of the stage: the roses are rouged, the cries of passion even sometimes (not always) ring false. I have read Byron again and again; I have sometimes, by reading Byron only and putting a strong constraint upon myself, got nearly into the mood to enjoy him. But let eye or ear once catch sight or sound of real poetry, and the enchantment vanishes.

  Byron had splendid powers of humour, and the most poetic satire that we have example of, fusing at times to hard irony. He had no strong comic sense, or he would not have taken an anti-social position, which is directly opposed to the Comic; and in his philosophy, judged by philosophers, he is a comic figure, by reason of this deficiency.

  Byron has always been, to many competent judges, one of the greatest poets of any age or country. To say that you do not like his poetry because you do not like the life he led is the same as saying you dislike a house because you do not like the architect who planned or the carpenter or mason who built it.

  To acquire a right feeling for Byron and his poetry is a discipline in equity. It is easy to yield to a sense of his power, to the force and sweep of his genius; it is easy to be repelled by his superficial insincerity, his license, his cynicism, his poverty of thought, his looseness of construction, his carelessness in execution. To know aright the evil and the good is difficult. It is difficult to feel justly towards this dethroned idol (presently, perhaps, to be re-enthroned), an idol in whose composition iron and clay are mingled with fine gold…. We must take him or leave him as he is,—the immortal spoilt by his age, great and petty, weak and strong, exalted and debased. A glorious wave that curls upon the sea-beach, though it leave sea-wrack and refuse on the sands, is more stimulating, more health-giving, than a pitcher of such salt water in one’s dressing-room, even if it be free from every floating weed…. He was a democrat among aristocrats and an aristocrat among democrats; a sceptic among believers and a believer among sceptics. And yet his line of advance was not a via media, nor was it determined by a spirit of moderation or critical balance.

  There are still a few faithful, like the well-known Greek scholar of whom it was remarked in my hearing that he never quoted any English save Byron and the Bible.

  His poetry had no repose; all is revolt. He is inspired by no faith, human or divine. There is passion, but little love, affection, or tenderness. No large views of human life or destiny soften the hard lines of his horizon; no enthusiasms, except it be for liberty or for inanimate nature, pierce its darkness. There is only the scorching light of the volcano, whose eruptive fire intensifies the blackness of the surrounding darkness, which in part is itself its own product, and casts a lurid glare on a narrow circle of the wilderness it has itself bared and blasted.

  As we should expect in a man “proud as Lucifer and beautiful as Apollo,” the personal note in Byron is supreme. It is the note of a struggling Titian’s tempest-anger, tempest-mirth; and yet his best work reached the very pinnacle of poetic glory. He has the distinction of having made English letters appreciated in Europe.

  But Byron the poet? Emphatically, he was not a poet; not if Shakespeare and Milton are poets. He was a magnificent satirist; the “Vision of Judgment,” “Don Juan,” and “Beppo” are very glories of wit, indignation, rhetoric; accomplished to the uttermost, marvellous and immortal; filled with scathing laughter, rich with a prodigal profusion of audacious fancy and riot of rhyme. Here the man is himself, eloquent and vehement of speech, alive and afire. No coarseness, cruelty, insolence, can blind us to the enduring excellence of these writings, to their virility and strength. This Byron is deathless. But the Byron of love lyrics and tragedies, and romantic tales, is a poet of infinite tediousness in execrable verse; in the severely courteous French phrase, he “does not permit himself to be read.” And he is not read; no one now reads “Lara,” or “Parisina,” or “The Corsair,” or “The Giaour,” or “The Bride of Abydos,” or “The Siege of Corinth,” or “The Island,” or the weary, weary plays. They are dead, and past resurrection; their passion is as poor and tawdry a thing as that of “Frankenstein” or “The Mysteries of Udolpho;” their garish theatricality is laughable, and we can scarce believe that these things of nought were once preferred to the noble simplicities and rough, true music of Scott.

  Mr. Swinburne may criticise his verbal workmanship, but Byron will still remain a great artist, inclining, perhaps, a little too much to rhetorical force at the expense of poetico-musical form. His affluence must be held to compensate for his lack of finish. Byron’s lack of philosophical insight and of sane judgment is balanced by great penetration and scope in some particular directions. His attitude towards nature is marked by sympathy with all that is lonely, self-contained, and vast.

  On the continent of Europe there can be no Byronic revival, for the reason that there has never been a decline. English critics might do what they would to “bear” the market—our readers will perhaps remember Mr. Saintsbury’s exploit in this line—Byron stock has always stood well in the literary and academic bourses of Germany and France. His poetry is very seriously studied at the universities; dissertations on Byron and Shakspere, treatises on “Byron der Uebermensch,” and the like, have abounded.

  There is very little truth in Byron’s work: his characters are nothing—mere photographs of his own postures; his action is largely melodrama; his workmanship is often hurried and slovenly to the last degree; and yet Byron impressed himself upon his generation as no one else could. The sheer force of his personality, perverse, unhealthy, but intense, burned his work into men’s minds. The emotion was for the most part not sane or well-grounded, and his work, therefore, has largely lost its interest; but for a time it had immense power.