character which had previously been sketched by Byron in his romantic poems, receives more concentrated expression. Manfred is the incarnation of a defiant, guilty, self-reliant personality, preserved from despair by its disdainful pride, linked to the common joys and sorrows of humanity by the slender but still vital thread of a passion which is also an unforgotten and unforgivable crime. The egotism which is the source and secret of his vaunted trength, foredooms Manfred to destruction; yet at the close of his course, he does not flinch. Such self-sustained stubbornness was Byron's ideal. But he infected the type with something melodramatic, which lowered it below the defiance of the Greek Prometheus, and he prepared no reconciliation of opposing motives in his dramatic scheme. Tested by common experience, the character he created in Manfred was soon found wanting in the essential elements of reality.

Byron's removal to Venice in 1817 marks a no less important epoch in his career than the meeting with Shelley at Geneva. He now came into close contact with the Italian genius in its raciest expression. He studied the writers of burlesque, and fastened with partiality on Pulci, two books of whose Morgante Maggiore he afterwards translated. It must not be imagined that the new form he was about to invent for English literature was borrowed from the Italian. Hookham Frere, in the octave stanzas of Whistlecraft, had already naturalised the Tuscan humoristic style. But neither the example of Frere nor the far more powerful influence of the Italian poets will suffice to account for Beppo and Don Juan. The blending of satire with description, of realism with imagination, of drollery with ideal beauty, were Italian possessions before Byron seized on them. But he added something characteristically his own. In Beppo he treated the incidents of a Venetian novella. At the same time he stood so completely outside his subject, and informed it with humour at once so far more pungent and so far more universal than pervades the best work of his supposed models, that Europe received at his hands a species hitherto unguessed and undiscovered. Beppo seems to have revealed to Byron the power that had been latent in him from the earliest days of boyhood; but which, partly from modesty and partly from the misdirection of his faculties, due to critical incapacity, had lain dormant. He found that he possessed an unrivalled command of comedy. Beppo was but a prelude to the two great works, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, on

which his fame will ultimately rest, and last as long as there are minds to comprehend their many-sided excellence.

In the year 1818 Byron began Don Juan. Until his death in 1824 he used it as the channel of expression for the varied reminiscences of past experience, and for the miscellaneous pictures of society and human life with which his mind was stored. It was a poem without a plan, and for this very reason well adapted to his purpose. Juan is a name: the fact that his parentage and earliest adventures are Spanish does not bring him into competition with the Don Juan of Spanish legend. He has but little in common with the hero of Molière's play or Mozart's opera. Juan's biography is the thread on which Byron hangs descriptions, episodes, satirical digressions, and reflective passages of brilliant audacity. That Don Juan, as Byron began it in the extant sixteen cantos, should have arrived at a conclusion, seems inconceivable. It was therefore scarcely a misfortune that death cut the poet short, when he had closed the fourth chapter of his hero's adventures. Byron, it may be observed, was essentially an occasional poet. He needed some substratum of fact or personal emotion for his imaginative edifices, and wrote best when he was least hampered by self-imposed theories of art. Childe Harold and Don Juan may therefore be regarded as continuous poetic journals. He used them as receptacles for the ideas that every passing day suggested. 'If things are farcical,' he once said to Trelawny, during their voyage to Greece, 'they will do for Don Juan; if heroical, you shall have another canto of Childe Harold! This accounts for the defect of structure in both poems. But while the change of style and tone in Childe Harold has been already pointed out, no such failure can be indicated in Don Juan. Within itself, and judged by the laws of its own nature, it is vigorously organised. The flux and reflux of contrasted incidents, -the balance of emotions between pathos and comedy, humour and satire, the correspondence of voluptuous and piquant, sensual and tender, touches,—the passage from Donna Julia to Haidee and Dudu,—the siege succeeding to the shipwreck,—the picture of St. Petersburgh under Catherine followed by that of England ruled by Whig and Tory peers ;—this counterpoise of interests, this rapid modulation from key to key, gives to Don Juan, fragment as it is, a fine artistic coherence.

The Drama lies outside the scope of this book. It is not therefore necessary to speak in detail about the tragedies, which occupied

much of Byron's time at Venice and Ravenna, but which, neither a's acting plays nor as poems, can be reckoned among his masterpieces. Cain and Heaven and Earth, called 'Mysteries' by their author, detach themselves from the rest, because Byron's insufficiency as a dramatist was in both these cases covered by the peculiar piquancy of the subject-matter. Cain, on its first appearance, had a veritable success of scandal; but, since its day, our advance in religious toleration and freedom of speech has shorn its daring scenes of half their lustre. The case is very different with the Vision of Judgment. In this poem, composed upon an event of so ephemeral importance as George III's funeral, and inspired by so trivial a passion as spite against Southey, Byron displayed in short compass the range and scope of his peculiar powers. His humour, common sense, inventive faculty, and luminous imagination, are here, as nowhere else, combined in perfect fusion. We only miss the pathos and the sympathy with nature displayed in previous compositions of a different purpose. The octave stanza, which he had essayed in Beppo, and perfected in Don Juan, is used with unrivalled command of its resources. Like some elemental substance taking shape beneath a spirittouch, the metre obeys his will, and from the slightest bias of his fancy assumes imperishable form. Satire, which at the outset of Byron's career crawled like a serpent, has here acquired the wings and mailed panoply of a dragon. The poetry of the Vision of Judgment, sustained by the companion pictures of Lucifer and Michael, is no less brilliant than its burlesque, expressed in St. Peter and the King.

Byron's best poetry admits of no selections being made from it. He was deficient in those qualities of ear and taste which are necessary for the production of studied perfection on a small scale. We must admire him for the sweep and strength of his genius, or not at all. With the exception of a few personal lyrics, characterised by simplicity of feeling and limpidity of style, his shorter pieces do not adequately represent him. He succeeded best in all the mixed specimens he attempted. But precisely because those poems blend so many qualities, contrasted and assimilated by the poet's power, they cannot be perused in fragments. We may reckon this impossibility of doing justice to Byron by selections among the reasons for his present comparative neglect. Yet the change of opinion which has taken place among cultivated people during the last half century in this respect, is so striking, that no critic of

Byron can avoid discussing it. To do so is in fact the simplest way of ascertaining his place in literature. During his lifetime he enjoyed a renown which has rarely fallen to the lot of any living writer. At the present day it is common to hear people asserting that Byron was not a true poet. Some causes of this revolution are patent. In the first place he cannot be called a moral poet. His collected works are not of a kind to be recommended for family reading; and the poems in which his genius shines most clearly, are precisely those which lie open to the charges of cynicism, unorthodoxy, or licentiousness. Again, he suffers from the very range and versatility of his performance. Like the Roman Empire, magnitudine laborat sud. His masterpieces are long, and make considerable demands upon the reader's patience. Byron has suffered even more from the mixed quality of his work. Not only are his poems voluminous, but they are exceedingly unequal; nor is it so easy, as in the case of Wordsworth, to separate what is worthless from the imperishable creations of his genius. The sudden burst of glory which followed upon the publication of Childe Harold, and the indiscriminate enthusiasm of his admirers, injured Byron during his lifetime by establishing the certainty that whatever he wrote would be read. It has injured him still more with posterity by stirring a reaction against claims in some respects so obviously ill-founded. Instead of subjecting the whole mass of Byron's poetry to a careful criticism, the world has been contented lately to reckon it among the nine days' wonders of a previous age. This injustice would, however, have been impossible, unless a current of taste inimical to Byron had set in soon after his death. Students of literature in England began about that period to assimilate Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Landor-those very poets whom Byron, in his uncritical arrogance, had despised or neglected. Their ears became accustomed to versification more exquisite and careful, to harmonies deeper and more refined if less resonant and brilliant. They learned to demand a more patient and studied delineation of natural beauty, passion more reserved, artistic aims at once more sober and more earnest, and emotions of a less obtrusively personal type. Tennyson and Browning, with all the poet-artists of the present generation, represent as sheer a departure from Byronian precedent as it is possible to take in literature. The very greatness of Byron has unfitted him for an audience educated in this different school of poetry. That greatness was his truth to fact, conceived

as action, feeling, energy; not as the material for picture-painting,. reflection, or analysis. Men nursed on the idyllic or the analytic kinds of poetry can hardly do him justice; not because he is exactly greater, or they indisputably less, but because he makes his best points in a region which is alien to their sympathy. The idyll was a species invented by the Greeks in their decline, when the passion, action and practical energy—the lyrical emotion and the dramatic fervour of their past literature-had become fit subjects for little pictures, jewels of verse, refracting the light cast on them by culture, and returning it to the eyes of the beholder in a prism of suggestive hues. Our age is in a somewhat similar sense idyllic. We are now accustomed to the art which appeals to educated sensibilities, by suggestions and reflections, by careful workmanship and attentive study of form, by artistically finished epitomes of feeling, by picturesquely blended reminiscences of realism, culture, and poetical idealism. Byron's work is too primitive, too like the raw material of poetry, in its crudity and inequality, to suit our Neo-Alexandrian taste. He wounds our sympathies; he violates our canons of correctness; he fails to satisfy our subtlest sense of art. He showers upon us in profusion what we do not want, and withholds the things for which we have been trained to crave. His personality inspires no love, like that which makes the devotees of Shelley as faithful to the man as they are loyal to the poet. His intellect, though robust and masculine, is not of the kind to which we willingly submit. As a man, as a thinker, as an artist, he is out of harmony with us. Nevertheless nothing can be more certain than Byron's commanding place in English literature. He is the only British poet of the nineteenth century who is also European; nor will the lapse of time fail to make his greatness clearer to his fellow-countrymen, when a just critical judgment finally dominates the fluctuations of fashion to which he has been subject.

It is desirable in all disputed cases to readjust the balance of criticism by reference to authorities who command attention. This disposes me to quote the opinions of Byron's most eminent contemporaries, not because they seem to represent the final truth about his poetry, but because their deliberate enthusiasm must force the reader to a reconsideration of his merits. Shelley, who was no mean critic, and who was certainly not blinded to Byron's faults by their close intimacy, wrote of him in private corre spondence thus: 'He touched the chord to which a million hearts