are sick of life, who are at war with society, .. and who to the last defy the whole power of earth and heaven. He always described himself as a man of the same kind with his favorite creations; as a man whose heart had been withered, whose capacity for happiness was gone and could not be restored, but whose invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or hereafter. There was created in the minds of many of these enthusiasts a pernicious and absurd association between intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the great commandments were, to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.". Macaulay. "There is the canker of misanthropy at the core of all he touches. We are acquainted with no writing so well calculated to extinguish in young minds all generous enthusiasm and gentle affection-all respect for themselves, and all love for their kind-and actually to persuade them that it is wise and manly and knowing to laugh not only at self-denial and restraint but at all aspiring ambition and all warm and constant affection. It seems to be Lord Byron's way never to excite a kind or noble sentiment without making haste to obliterate it by a torrent of unfeeling mockery or relentless abuse and taking pains to show how well these passing fantasies may be reconciled to a system of resolute misanthropy.. We do not consider it unfair to say that Lord Byron appears to us to be the zealous apostle of a certain fierce and magnificent misanthropy, which has already saddened his poetry with too deep a shade, and not only led to a great misapplication of great talents, but contributed to render popular some very false estimates of the constituents of human happiness and merit."-Francis Jeffrey. "What does he find in science but deficiencies, and in religion but mummeries? Does he so much as preserve poetry? Of the divine mantle, the last garment which a poet respects, he makes a rag to stamp upon, to wring, to make holes in, out of sheer wantonness. A darkness which seems eternal fell upon his soul, so that at times he saw evil in everything. Byron, being unhappy, distinguished himself among all other poets as Satan is distinguished among all angels."-Emilio Castelar. "Moody and misanthropical, he rejected the whole manner of thought of his predecessors; and the scepticism of the eighteenth century suited him as little as its popular belief.. He proclaimed to the world his misery and despair."-Thomas Arnold. "It [Don Juan'] is a work full of soul, bitterly savage in its misanthropy."—Goethe. In Don Juan' he pours forth a flood of cynical contempt on the high-strung romantic and sentimental fancies dear to that popular taste which he had himself done so much to encourage."-W. H. Courthope. 66 'Byron wandered through the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet; wounded and bearing the arrow in his wound. The emptiness of the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron."-Mazzini. "He veneered the true and noble self which gave life to his poetry with a layer of imperfectly comprehended cynicism and weak misanthropy, which passed with him for worldly wisdom."-J. A. Symonds. [In speaking of Don Juan'] These are the words of a sceptic, even of a cynic-it is in this he ends. Sceptic through misanthropy, cynic through bravado, a sad and combative You see clearly that he humor always impels him. is always the same, in excess and unhappy, bent on destroy, ing himself."--Taine. ILLUSTRATIONS. "Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat, Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit ! By nature vile, ennobled but by name, Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame. -Epitaph on a Newfoundland Dog. "I have not loved the world, nor the world me: Nor coined my cheek to smiles, nor cried aloud They could not deem me one of such; I stood Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could, 66 Dogs or men!-for I flatter you in saying As little as the moon stops for the baying -Don Juan. 3. Egotism Self-Revelation. "No poet ever. stamped upon his writings a deeper impress of personality or viewed outward objects in a manner more peculiar to himself. Everything about him was intensely subjective, individual, Byronic. Self is ever uppermost in his mind. The whole world is called upon to listen to the recital of the joys and the agonies of George Gordon, Lord Byron. He tells his thousands of readers that they are formed of more vulgar clay than himself, that he despises them from his inmost heart, that their life is passed in a bustling oscillation between knavery and folly, and that all mankind is but a degraded mass of animated dust. In whatever atti . tude he places himself, he evidently intends it to be the one which shall excite admiration or honor. . He gradually came to consider the world as made for him and unconsciously to subordinate the interests and happiness of others to his own.... We think that this egotism or selfish ness in Byron was the parent of most of his vices, inasmuch as it emancipated his mind from the burden of those duties which grow out of a man's relations with society."—E. P. Whipple. "He was himself the beginning, the middle, and the end of his own poetry, the hero of every tale, the chief object in every landscape. There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry."-Macaulay. "Never, in the first flight of his thoughts, did he liberate himself from himself. throughout. He dreams of himself and sees himself He meditated too much upon himself to be enamored of anything else. . . . No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination; he would not metamorphose himself into another. They are his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which he introduces into his verses."-Taine. . "Je suis en moi l'infini,' exclaimed Byron, and this infinity of egotism left him in the end, like Napoleon, defeated and defrauded, narrowed into the bounds of a small solitary and sterile island in the great ocean of human existence-or would have left him so had not Greece summoned him and Missolonghi set him free."-Edward Dowden. "He has treated hardly any subject but one-himself; now the man in Byron is a nature even less sincere than the poet. This beautiful and blighted being is at bottom a coxcomb. He posed all his life long."-Edmond Scherer. "In Byron the Ego is revealed in all its pride of power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled plenitude of all its faculties. The world around him neither rules nor tempts him. The Byronian Ego aspires to rule it.. . Byron stamps every object he portrays with his own individuality." Mazzini. "That diversity of character which dramatists represent through fiction's personages, Byron assumed himself; and he was either the villain, the enthusiast, the lover, or the jester, according as the wantonness of his omnipotent genius suggested. He has not left a scrap of writing upon which he did not stamp an image of himself."-Thomas Moore. Childe Harold may not be, nor do we believe he is, Lord Byron's very self, but he is Lord Byron's picture sketched by Lord Byron himself."-Walter Scott. "He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward things, sits in the centre of his thoughts, and enjoys dark night, bright day, the glitter and the gloom, in cell monastic.' . . . In reading Lord Byron's works, he himself is never absent from one's mind."-William Hazlitt. ILLUSTRATIONS. "And now was Childe Harold sore sick at heart, |