ute or two. A downright steadiness of manner was the way to his good opinion. Will Rose, looking by accident at his feet, saw him scowling furiously; but on his showing no consciousness, his lordship resumed his easy manner. What I liked about him, besides his boundless genius, was his generosity of spirit, as well as of purse, and his utter contempt of all the affectations of literature. He liked Moore and me because, with all our other differences, we were both goodnatured fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the mot-pour-rire. He wrote from impulse, never from effort, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. SIR WALTER SCOTT.

BYRON AND THE WORLD'S TREATMENT OF HIM.

He came into the world; and the world treated him as his mother had treated him, sometimes with fondness, sometimes with cruelty, 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 parent, but the spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society. His first poems were received with a contempt which, feeble as they were, they did not absolutely deserve. The poem which he published on his return from his travels was, on the other hand, extolled far above its merit. At twentyfour he found himself on the pinnacle of literary fame, with Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other

distinguished writers beneath his feet.

There is scarcely an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence. Everything that could stimulate and everything that could gratify the strongest propensities of our nature, the gaze of a hundred drawing rooms, the acclamations of the whole nation, the applause of applauded men, the love of lovely women, all this world and all the glory of it, were at once offered to a youth

to whom nature had given violent passions, and whom education had never taught to control them. He lived as many men live who have no similar excuse to plead for their faults. But his countrymen and countrywomen would love and admire him. They were resolved to see

in his excesses only the flash and outbreak of that same fiery mind which glowed in his poetry. Everything,

it seemed, was to be forgiven to youth, rank, and genius. Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. LORD MACAULAY.

BYRON AND SCOTT

BYRON'S FORCE AND IMPETUOSITY.

Like Scott, Byron is often defective in his rhymes and the other minutiae of his art, and is wanting in exquisite finish in general and absolute perfection and felicity of expression in occasional passages. But the positive blots on his style are more frequent and more offensive than those of Scott, while his best passages are finer. He lacked the patience and self-discipline, he lacked the single-minded devotion to art, without thought of self, requisite for the production of perfect works of art. Like Scott, he wrote with great rapidity. The "Bride of Abydos" is said to have been written in four days; the "Corsair" in ten days; the third canto of “Childe Harold" in a few weeks; the fourth, in its original draft of 126 stanzas, in a month. He wrote to relieve himself, or impress the public, not to produce something perfectly beautiful. He falls beneath Scott in the broader technical excellencies of structure, unity, development, etc. His poems consist of passages of greater or less excellence, strung together without much connection or plan. Yet there is a force and variety in Byron's work that carries us along, so that in such poems as

"Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" we scarcely note this lack. Here, indeed, we come upon the qualities that give Byron's verse its permanent place in literature. Two critics as different as Swinburne and Matthew Ar

The Residence of Lord Byron, 1811. From a Drawing by C. Stanfield, A. R. A.

nold agree in according to his poetry "the splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength." PROFESSOR W. J. ALEXANDER, PH.D.

BYRON'S INDEPENDENCE AND INDIVIDUALITY AS A POET.

The position of Byron as a poet is a curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Something of the school of Pope clings to him; yet no one so completely broke away from old measures and old manners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At first he has no interest whatever in the human questions which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy except that which centres round the problem of his own being. "Cain," the most thoughtful of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the representation of the way in which the doctrines of original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We feel naturally great interest in this strong personality, put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies us at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in power, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into the opposite extreme in "Don Juan." It is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all the conventionality of social morality and religion and politics. It claimed for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual act and thought in opposition to that force of society which tends to make all men after one pattern. This was the best result of his work, though the way in which it was done can scarcely be approved. the poet of nature, he belongs also to the old and the new school. Byron's sympathy with Nature is a sympathy

As