cohesion. He was the child of impulse, never unconscious of higher ideals, but habitually swayed and governed by the lower, or the lowest. His poetry was the exact reflex of his life. He was perpetually sinning, and blaming other people for his sin. He lived in a hard-drinking, fast-living age, and he drank harder and lived faster than anybody. He never seems to have known a good woman. His views of womanhood are simply brutal in their callous carnality. The purity and chivalry of woman's nature had no existence for him. It is the pure in heart who see not only God but the God-like, and it is the genius that is pure-hearted which scales the loftiest heights of achievement; but to Byron such heights were impossible. The distractions of vice disturbed and poisoned his genius. The only form of womanly purity he ever met was unsympathetic purity. It is needless to enter here into the vexed controversy of Byron's relations to his wife, but it is pretty clear that Miss Millbank was the last woman Byron ought to have married. She was precise, formal, and cold; he was passionate and impulsive. A man with a record like Byron's, if he is to be reclaimed, can only be reclaimed by the most patient sympathy, the most prudent and delicate tact. But of this faculty Lady Byron unhappily had little. Fletcher, Byron's valet, said that any woman could manage his master except her ladyship. That she irritated Byron by her coldness is beyond dispute; and that he behaved badly to her is equally clear. But beyond that there is no evidence. The foul and odious myth evolved from the lively imagination of Mrs. Beecher Stowe has been repeatedly disproved, and may be consigned to the shameful oblivion which is its due. Byron was a bad man in his relations to women,

beyond all question, but he was not so bad a man as Mrs. Stowe imagined him. The chief thing for us to note, in our attempt to estimate the significance of Byron in poetry, is that his life coloured his poetry absolutely, and that that life was one long series of misadventures, follies, and errors, for the most part conditioned by the lower instincts of his nature, and embittered by the usual results of unbridled passions and undisciplined desires. Byron sowed the wind; in his poetry the world has reaped the whirlwind.

So much in relation to the moral aspects of Byron's worth every just critic is bound to admit. The plea that genius is a chartered libertine was one Byron perpetually paraded, but it is a plea which the common sanity of the race instinctively rejects. We must repeat of Byron, as of Burns, that genius has no more inherent right than dulness to break the moral law. It is, indeed, the more bound to respect it, because, as genius is the highest effluence of the intellect, so its example should be the highest manifestation of the soul. Every man of genius ought to say with Milton, "I am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, or the maxims of the free man by the actions of the slave; but by the grace of God I have kept my life unsullied." But, leaving the question of Byron's life, what are the distinctive features of his poetry? They are-superb force and imaginative daring, a masculine strength of style, an intensity of conception and vigour of execution which few English poets have ever rivalled. He has little play of fancy; it is in imagination he excels. His verse has a large and noble movement, and inspires the mind with an exhilarating sense of freedom. He was not a thinker, but he insensibly perceived and

absorbed the new thought of his day, and gave it courageous expression. He did much to accelerate the decay of old institutions and the birth of new. He swept like a storm across the mind of Europe, and uttered in the language of the storm the new thoughts which were then trying to liberate and express themselves. To say that Byron is a great poet is not enough; he is among the greatest. It is the fashion now to depreciate his claims, and Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have both demonstrated the looseness of his rhymes, and his ignorance of metrical construction. To do this is easy. Byron aimed at force rather than art, and art was less fastidious in his days than ours. He wrote carelessly because he cared little for the criticism of his age, and was at war with it. But for a man ignorant of metrical construction he has done exceedingly well. He won the praise of Goethe, and the foremost place of influence in his time. He alone of the writers of his time shared with Scott a European reputation, and his reputation entirely eclipsed Scott's. Hitherto English poetry had been insulated; he lifted it into a cosmopolitan currency. In the large and startling effects of imagination few can surpass him. What picture of a Swiss glacier, in the early morn when the mists are rolling off, can excel in truth of description and daring of imagination such lines as these?—

The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury,
Like foam from the roused ocean of deep hell,

Whose every wave breaks on a living shore,
Heaped with the damned, like pebbles!

It is in passages like these that the strength of Byron is seen: it is in virtue of poetic power like this

that Byron has taken his place among the great poets of all time.

The last chapters of Byron's life are familiar to everybody. His life in Italy was one profound disgrace. Shelley said the best thing to hope for Byron at that time was that he might meet with a violent and sudden death. But it was at this period of moral decadence that some of his most extraordinary work was done. It was in Italy he wrote "Don Juan," one of the cleverest books the world has ever seen; one of the saddest and most wonderful, but also one of the most immoral. Then came the sudden kindling of patriotic fervour for the cause of Greek independence. It seemed as if Byron, after all, would triumph over his lower self, and at mid-manhood begin a new and noble career of public service. But it was not to be. On the 14th of April, 1824, the fatal fever struck him at Missolonghi. On the 19th, with his last thoughts on his wife, his sister, and his child, he died. Like a sudden shock of sorrow the news ran round the world, "Byron is dead!" Tennyson, speaking many years afterward, said, "Byron was dead. I thought the whole world was at an end. I thought everything was over and finished for every one that nothing else mattered." "I was told it," writes Mrs. Carlyle, "in a room full of people. Had I heard that the sun and moon had fallen out of their spheres, it could not have conveyed to me the feeling of a more awful blank than did the simple words, 'Byron is dead."" Mrs. Shelley, who had known him on his worst side, and had little cause to love him, wrote in that hour of loss and consternation, "Beauty sat on his countenance, and power beamed from his eye. I knew him in the bright days of youth. Can I forget our excursions on the lake, when he sang the

Tyrolese hymn, and his voice harmonised with winds and waves? Can I forget his attentions and consolations to me during my deepest misery? Never!" Even Lady Byron sent for Fletcher, and was overcome with passionate grief; but, as he observed, was "perfectly implacable." That indeed was the general attitude of public opinion toward him: remorseful, but implacable. Greece would have buried his remains in the temple of Theseus; England refused them Westminster Abbey. The Grecian cities contended for his body, but the country of his birth turned from him with cold disfavour. It was therefore in the quiet churchyard at Hucknall, on the 16th of July, 1824, that his unquiet dust at last found rest.

In Mrs. Browning's "Vision of Poets," in which the poets of ancient or modern fame are touched off with a precision and beauty of phrase altogether admirable, there is no verse more appropriate than that which describes Byron :

And poor proud Byron! sad as grave,
And salt as life; forlornly brave,

And quivering with the dart he drave.

The pity which the poet-heart of Mrs. Browning felt for Byron will always be the predominant feeling of the world towards him. Much there was in him altogether contemptible-his vanity, his insincere vapourings, his coarseness, his selfishness, his devotion to what he describes as that most old-fashioned and gentlemanly vice-avarice; but when all is said and done, Byron attracts in no common degree the sympathy of the world. Before we measure out hard judgment upon him, let us consider the environment of his life, and remember that with what measure we mete it shall be measured to us again.