nary popularity had been weighed in the balance and found wanting, it was only to exchange one source of poetical excitement for another. The craving for something new was universal, and such a demand was not likely to remain ungratified; it invariably finds or creates the luxury upon which it seeks to feed. Under this powerful feeling, Lord Byron was as completely evoked from his original obscurity, as was Napoleon himself from the first subsiding elements of the French Revolution-and, like Napoleon, he came forward to astonish, overthrow, and be dethroned. Nothing too could have been more startling or original than his commencement. Other poets had

attempted to conciliate the public favour by assent and flattery; but in Byron's eyes it was valueless unless it was obtained by sheer violence, and therefore he carried it, like a conqueror, by storm. He took for his theme the worthlessness of those whom he addressed, the emptiness of their pursuits, and the hopelessness of their destinies, and branded them all with fierce and withering contempt. Such was constantly his world-defying theme, whether he spoke under the gloomy aspects of Harold, the Corsair, Lara, the Adrian Renegade, or the more sportive character of Don Juan; in every change he told society that their struggle for glory and happiness was a dream, and their fancied excellence a deceit, for that man was a ferocious, frivolous, and heartless being, as unworthy of life as he was unfitted for immortality. The universality of such a challenge prevented a reply: when the whole world was thus defied, who would throw the first stone at the maligner? And these odious and repulsive charges were delivered in far other language than that of common misanthropy. They were not only surrounded with a show of truth, but invested with a splendour of poetry that could only find a parallel in the brightest of past ages; and they were expressed with a vehement earnestness that swept before it the hearts of men, and deprived them of all power to pause or deliberate. Here was the luxury of a new sensation, for which much could be overlooked or forgiven. But there were ulterior considerations independent of mere poetic power, that gave a stronger attractiveness to such unpalatable doctrines. Each reader, for the time, was exalted above the rest of his species; and he could look down with an air of superior wisdom upon the dark valley

beneath his feet, and sneer at the earthlings who were toiling and fretting in the worthless struggle of existence. Thus the self-love of each was gratified at the expense of his fellows, and he was enabled to vent his petty scorn or hatred by a new and most overwhelming nomenclature of misanthropy. A powerful additional charm also to Byron's poetry arose from the history and personal feelings of its noble author. The lofty and isolated pinnacle upon which he stood, and the almost supernatural energy of bitterness with which he denounced and defied society, would have constituted him a demon rather than a man, so that the astonishment and admiration he at first excited would soon have been succeeded by abhorrence. But the poet declared that he had loved his species and been only recompensed with their hate-that he had trusted them and been deceived and that they had driven him from among them, and forced him to retire to that unenviable pre-eminence from which he would fain still descend and mingle with them in affectionate sympathy, but they would not-and as he announced these his wrongs, whether real or imaginary, and bewailed his banishment, it seemed at times as if "tears such as angels weep burst forth," to attest that his heart still yearned with the fondest sympathies of our nature. It was these keen sudden flashes of human feeling breaking through the darkness of his poetry, like lightning through a thunder-cloud, that invested with a glorious halo what would otherwise have been an unmitigated and forbidden gloom, so that hostility was softened, and sympathy wept over woes which had wrung from the poet's heart such throes and denunciations of agony. Here then was a cause, and an apology, for the misanthropical spirit of the poet, which exalted its most questionable attributes into beauties, and obtained for it a popularity that threw every other kind of poetry into the shade. The Byronic enthusiasm, when it had reached its height, was displayed by the public in correspondent exhibitions. It was thought, that a man who assassinated his neighbour in the dark, might have valid apologies for the deed: an infidel might elope with the wife of a Turk, and slay the unreasonable husband who presumed to punish her; and a pirate, who scuttled ships, and cut throats without compunction, might have his "thousand crimes" redeemed by his one virtue of domestic affection. All these were

heroes, and amiable personages, at whose excellencies men kindled, and over whose sorrows women wept. Every rhymer, also, who could construct a stanza, began to discover himself an afflicted, persecuted man, of whom the world was unworthy; and thus in every street and highway, there were to be found poetasters blaspheming humanity, or weeping to the moon and stars, and complaining that men and the very elements had joined in a conspiracy to annoy them. And yet, how miserably had they mistaken the nature of Lord Byron's misanthropy! It was not his kind in the abstract which he hated, but the artificial character that had been impressed upon them. He dreamt of certain noble elements as constituting the perfection of the human being, but which had been perverted or effaced by the corruptions of modern refinement. This was the only original sin through which man had fallen, while the only imparadised Adam was the fierce barbarian roaming unchecked, and obeying nothing but the impulses of his own free will. He would fain have advanced, or rather thrown back, the whole human race into this Utopian condition, and made man a loving, hating, and slaying animal by turns, and a poetical being in every change, like his own Giaours and Corsairs, whom he invested with a few moral impulses, to redeem them from total depravity; and who, with hearts overflowing with benevolence, were constrained to deeds of murder and plunder by a sort of irresistible destiny. These were the unvarnished men whom he delighted to contemplate; the men of fearless impulses, to which he would have again reduced mankind, in preference to the cold and formal impersonations of modern civilization; but the insuperable obstacles to such a consummation threw him into a state of despair, that attained its climax in the withering contempt with which he branded the whole existing state of society, in the pages of Don Juan. Had he but taken a right estimate of the present state of man! -had he but seen it in reference to the past and the future! He would then have perceived that man does not live in vain; and that all, however untoward and unhopeful here, is finding, through its dark and rugged channels, that eternal ocean in which it seeks to terminate. But without faith there can be no hope, and therefore, like the blinded Cyclops, he continued to grope within his cave, and murmur his disappointments. In

such a state, it was a relief to throw himself into the whirlwind of warfare; and a thought still lingered within his heart that, by a desperate effort, his theories upon human nature might yet be realized, and that liberty, civilization, and happiness, might be engrafted upon the barbarian virtues of oppressed and allen Greece. He only lived long enough to witness the natural tendency of these wild unregulated energies, from which he had hoped so much, and to know that the half-savage state of man exceeds every other only in the magnitude of its crimes, and the completeness of its depravity.

But vast as were the merits of Lord Byron's poetry, its popularity even already has fallen greatly into abeyance. By universal consent, indeed, it has been raised to a high and permanent place in the literature of our country; but this concession has been made to its intellectual merits, rather than to its moral worth, or its influence upon the sympathies and affections of the public. The brightness with which it dazzled and astonished, the irresistible force with which it struck and overpowered, were followed by a reaction that left time for calm, dispassionate inquiry; and the sophisms which it had so eloquently inculcated, were reduced to their original nothingness or deformity. Were the endearing courtesies and mild virtues of the artificial state of society worth nothing? Were those delicate and manifold threads that so gently unite man to man a mere selfish union, and an inglorious bondage? Were those ameliorations of the ills of life, and those numberless facilities for human improvement, which our present social state has created, to be foregone for that poetical state of society in which love and hate might rage without disguise, and without control? And above all, was man in very truth that abject, shivering, helpless creature, whose beginning and end were equally in nothingness, and whose far-reaching soul left nothing but the crumbling church-yard skull which it had once tenanted? The wild glare of barbarism, and the thick, dismal gloom of atheism, were atmospheres of existence from which the better feelings of the age turned away with loathing and indignation: no poetry, however magnificent, could atone for the insult of having recommended them. And still, society in its estimate of Lord Byron, has done him ample justice. It acknowledges, that, as a poet, he was incontestably the greatest of his illus

trious contemporaries, although his power had been that of a malignant sorcerer, instead of a spirit of health. His parallel is only to be found in past ages, among that illustrious pair whom he so nearly approached; but the comparison is only the more unfavourable, because these authors are, Shakspeare, the lover of humanity, and Milton, the poet of immortality.

This moral test, which has been acquiring the ascendancy during the nineteenth century, was imperiously needed, to check the extravagances of the Romantic school of poetry; and its existence is the most gratifying indication that could be afforded of the healthy spirit and improveable capacity of the age. During the supremacy indeed of the new race of great poets, and while the public mind was in a whirl of astonishment and delight, the language of scruple was unheard, or but faintly whispered, and society was unwilling to be roused from that delightful trance into which it had been thrown. The literary censorship, in most instances, assisted to confirm this. acquiescence, by the unmeasured laudations in which it dealt; and a fundamental principle in the "cant of criticism" was, that the moral perversities of intellectual power were not to be scanned too closely. But the dream was exhausted, and men awoke, and instead of turning themselves once more to sleep, they betook themselves to examination and inquiry. The stern cui bono, with its reference to the highest and best interests of our species, was established as the criterion of popular approbation, and it has exhibited results which are, perhaps, unparalleled in the history of any former poetical period. This is the spirit that annihilated in an instant the obscenities of Little, and condemned the heartless immoralities of Don Juan -which will not tolerate either sneer or sophism against the sacred things of Revelation, nor even sympathise with the perversities of an alien creed, however beautiful may be the poetry with which they are adorned. The sanctities of humanity have equally banished the spurious sentimentalism of universal liberality, and the stern gloom of all-pervading misanthropy, so that they are no longer recognised as legitimate poetical elements; and as for the spirit of devotion, it can no longer be kindled by the poet who invokes a strange god, or eulogizes a false prophet. And then, too, the great pervading themes which have formed the chief delight of poets, the rose-wreathed