depths by the portent of Napoleon, alternately amused and angered by the new literary impulse which was voicing itself in the "Edinburgh," the "Quarterly," and "Blackwood's," and ready, as perhaps a British public never was ready, before or since, for a new and mad enthusiasm. Upon such a morning as this Byron could wake and find himself famous; and in a day fittingly introduced by such a morning, he was able to eclipse men so superior in every attribute of manhood as Sir Walter Scott, and poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth.

It is with a sort of half-nauseated amusement that the reader of to-day toils through the mass of Byronic literature. He dutifully notes the slightly deformed foot, the teeth of exquisite brilliance and regularity, the hands gloved indoors as well as out to keep them white, and the temples, shaved, as Byron said, to preserve the vigour of the hair — although incidentally of course the process heightened a 'marble brow'; and wonders whether outside a library of three-volume novels so much space were ever before given to sentimental nonsense. Sir Walter Scott was lame, and bore his infirmity like a Christian and a gentleman. Coleridge-it surprises us a little-kept his hands with scrupulous neatness. Wordsworth dressed like a peasant, and sometimes drove abroad in a dung-cart, with a plain deal board laid across the sides for a seat. Cowper wore a night-cap which has, alas, been perpetuated by Romney. Crabbe, in his old age, grew

beautifully grey, so that a little child in his parish said quite simply when told of his death, "We shall never see his good white head going up into the pulpit any more." These matters are incidents in notable careers which possess a certain interest if we stumble upon them casually, but are in no way essential to our understanding of the career itself. In Byron's case they are of the essence of his make-up.

I am resolute to exclude the judgement of Mr. Saintsbury here because of his well-known antiByronic views; but none the less, in reminding us that the light of Byron's muse, so far from being that which never was on land or sea, is the light which shines nightly on the front of the stage, he speaks words of truth and soberness. Byron was the great literary poseur of the century. No estimate of his character or his work can be adequate which leaves his consuming vanity out of account; nor does the memory recall any mind of a high order of ability the ideals of whose vanity were so perverse. Egotism could scarce go further in the direction of that perversity which is close allied to madness, than in the attempt, made again and again in his writings and conversation, to represent himself as the hero of all sorts of dubious adventures; unless it were in an endeavour to appear the victim of melancholy induced by remorse. This pageant of his bleeding heart" was wonderfully effective. It brought multitudes of readers and ad

mirers; but it came perilously near to justifying Mr. Mallock's recipe for writing "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 may be devilled with mock despair."

It is impertinent, of course, but then, so was Lord Byron, and most free from taint or suspicion of hypocrisy when he was impertinent, as in his early "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," — though even here one is forced to add a postscript to the effect that this satire was almost certainly composed with a view merely to the English Bards, and only launched at the Scotch Reviewers after the famous criticism in the "Edinburgh" had opened the way for a little more extended and telling insolence than the poet had originally contemplated.

It will readily be imagined that any one who looks for a unifying principle, philosophic, religious, or political, in the mass of Byron's verse will look in vain. The centre of all is Himself. With Protean facility he appears and reappears as Childe Harold, as Manfred, as Don Juan. This is not for a moment to question his possession of extraordinary poetic gifts; it is not to impugn the courage which he undoubtedly possessed, or the generosity of which he was occasionally capable, or the sincerity of his attachment to the cause of liberty, or the enormous

obstacles which heredity, early training, and later environment opposed to the development of any consistent and satisfying manhood. The broken sentence, which he interrupted when he found himself likely to be betrayed into sincere and earnest expression, was characteristic of his conversation; and it was necessary that his general attitude toward men and things fitted to dwarf the central figure of himself should have been one of denial or scorn. Hence his cynicism not only becomes him, but is essential to him. There is no need to formulate its gospel into the code of perversity which Macaulay attributed to him, "Thou shalt hate thy neighbour, and thou shalt love thy neighbour's wife." Byron was not the man to own allegiance to anything, not even to a person of his own choosing or a creed of his own making. He was no unbeliever, as Shelley thought himself to be. Indeed, if the testimony of his valet Fletcher is to be received at anything like face value, he maintained a pretty consistent claim to faith in the fundamentals of Christianity. Had he been a frank and devoted apostle of revolution, as Shelley was, he might conceivably have placed us under a genuine debt: the note of scorn may help when it ministers to something higher; though unruly and treacherous, it sometimes proves a useful servant; but as a master its tyranny is hopeless and fruitless, and Byron was more completely its slave than Swift had ever been. There is a trace of tonic quality in the sæva indignatio of the latter. The

mockery of the former would, if no corrective were supplied, poison the very fountains of moral and spiritual health.

On the other hand we may admit Byron's genuine love for this goodly frame of earth. His pessimism does not extend, like Thomson's,' to sea or sky. It is the latter who sings,

For I am infinitely tired

With this old sphere we once admired,
With this old earth we loved too well,
And would not mind a change of Hell.

Byron felt the freedom of the open sea and responded to the strange influence-half uplift, half oppression of the mountains. Most of all, perhaps, he took joy of the meeting of sea and land upon the picturesque Italian coast, where it was his custom after bathing to climb to some point of observation and sit for hours in thought. There is no affectation in his feeling for nature, although there is sometimes a trace of bombast in his versification of it, even the famous

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!

containing just a suggestion of Ossian. But when men begin to move and dream and suffer on the sea or in the hills, then at once the motive of sincerity grows mixed. Manfred in the Alps is hopelessly melodramatic:

1 The reference is, of course, to "B. V." of The City of Dreadful Night; not to him of The Seasons.