women, visited Lady Hester Stanhope, swam across the Hellespont, rattled at the windows of seraglios, and even-so Goethe and the world believed -murdered a man with a yataghan and captured an island of the Cyclades. Before he began to sing of Lara and the Giaour he was himself a Giaour, himself Lara and Conrad; he had travelled with a disguised Gulnare, he had been beloved by Medora, he had stabbed Hassan to the heart, and fought by the side of Alp the renegade; or, if he had not done quite all this, people insisted that he had, and he was too melancholy to deny the impeachment.

Languid as Byron affected to be, and haughtily indolent, he wrote with extraordinary persistence and rapidity. Few poets have composed so much in so short a time. The first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812 lead off the giddy masque of his productions, which for the next few years were far too numerous to be mentioned here in detail. Byron's verse romances, somewhat closely modelled in form on those of Scott, began with the Giaour, and each had a beautiful, fatal hero "of one virtue and a thousand crimes," in whom tens of thousands of awestruck readers believed they recognised the poet himself in masquerade. All other poetry instantly paled before the astounding success of Byron, and Scott, who had reigned unquestioned as the popular minstrel of the age, "gave over writing verse-romances" and took to prose. Scott's courtesy to his young rival was hardly more exquisite than the personal respect which Byron showed to one whom he insisted in addressing as "the Monarch of Parnassus"; but Scott's gentle chieftains were completely driven out of the field by the Turkish bandits and pirates. All this time Byron was writing exceedingly little that has stood the test of time; nor, indeed, up to the date of his marriage in 1815, can it be said that he had produced much of any real poetical importance. He was now, however, to be genuinely unhappy and candidly inspired.

Lord Byron

After a Portrait by W. Westall in the possession of
Coningsby D'Israeli, Esq.

Adversity drove him in upon himself, and gave him something of creative

sincerity. Perhaps, if he had lived, and had found peace with advancing years, he might have become a great artist. But that he never contrived to be. In 1816 he left England, shaking its dust from his feet, no longer a pinchbeck pirate, but a genuine outlaw, in open enmity with society. This enfranchisement acted upon his genius like a tonic, and in the last eight years of his tempestuous and lawless life he wrote many things of extraordinary power and even splendour. Two sections of his work approach, nearer than any others, perfection in their kind. In a species of magnificent invective, of which the Vision of Judgment is the finest example, Byron rose to the level of Dryden and Swift; in the picturesque satire of social life-where he boldly imitated the popular poets of Italy, and in particular Casti and Pulci-his extreme ease and versatility, his masterly blending of humour and pathos, ecstasy and misanthropy, his variegated knowledge of men and manners, gave him, as Scott observed, something of the universality of Shakespeare. Here he is to be studied in Beppo and in the unmatched Don Juan of his last six years. It is in these and the related works that we detect the only perdurable Byron, the only poetry that remains entirely worthy of the stupendous fame of the author.

Lord Byron

It is the fatal defect of Byron that his verse is rarely exquisite. That indescribable combination of harmony in form with inevitable propriety in language which thrills. the reader of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Shelley, of Tennyson-this is scarcely to be discerned in Byron. We are, in exchange, presented with a rapid volume of rough melody, burning words which are torches rather than stars, a fine impetuosity, a display of personal temperament which it has nowadays become more interesting to study in the poet than in the poetry, a great noise of trumpets and kettledrums in which the more delicate melodies of verse are drowned. These refinements, however, are imperceptible to all but native ears, and the lack of them has not prevented Byron from seeming to foreign critics to be by far the greatest and the most powerful of our poets. There was no difficulty in comprehending his splendid,

rolling rhetoric; and wherever a European nation stood prepared to in

Mary Ann Chaworth

veigh against tyranny and conventionality, the spirit of Byron was ready to set its

young poets ablaze.

Hence, while in England the influence of Byron on poetry was not in the least degree commensurate with his fame, and while we have here to look to prose-writers, such as Bulwer and Disraeli, as his most direct disciples, his verse inspired a whole galaxy of poets on the Continent. The revival of Russian and Polish literature dates from Byron; his spirit is felt in the entire attitude and in not a few of the accents of Heine and of Leopardi; while to the romantic writers of France he seemed the final expression of all that was magnificent. and intoxicating. Neither Lamartine nor Vigny, Victor Hugo nor Musset, was inde

From an Engraving by Stone after an Original pendent of Byron's influence, and in the

Drawing

last-mentioned we have the most exact reproduction of of the the peculiar Byronic gestures and passionate self-abandonment which the world has seen.

In Don Juan Byron had said that "poetry is but passion." This was a heresy, which it would be easy to refute, since by passion he intended little more than a relinquishing of the will to the instincts. But it was also a prophecy, for it was the reassertion of the right of the individual imagination to be a law to itself, and all subsequent emancipation of the spirit may be traced back to the ethical upheaval of which Byron was the storm-thrush. He finally broke up the oppressive silence which the pure accents of Wordsworth and Coleridge had not quite been able to conquer. With Byron the last rags of the artificiality which had bound European expression for a century and a half were torn off and flung to the winds. He taught roughly, melodramatically, inconsistently, but he taught a lesson of force and vitality. He was full of technical faults, drynesses, flatnesses; he lacked the power to finish; he offended by a hundred From an Engraving by Finden after an Originai careless impertinences; but his whole being

Lady Noel Byron

Drawing

was an altar on which the flame of personal genius flared like a conflagration.

The

George Gordon Byron, the sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), was the only child of Captain John Byron by his second wife, Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born on the 22nd of January 1788, in London. father, who had led a life of the wildest recklessness, died at Valenciennes in 1791. He had abandoned his wife, who, with her infant son, settled in lodgings in Aberdeen. From his father, and his father's line, the poet inherited his spirit of adventurous eccentricity, and from his mother his passionate temper and amenity to tenderness. In 1794 the sudden death of his cousin in Corsica made "the little boy who lives at Aberdeen" the heir to the title, and in 1798 the poet succeeded his grand-uncle, the "wicked Lord Byron" who had killed Mr. Chaworth in 1765, and who had survived at Newstead to extreme old age in a wretched defiance of society. After going to school at Nottingham, the boy was brought to London in 1799 to be treated, but in vain, for a club-foot. In 1800 Byron made his first "dash into poetry," inspired by the "transparent" beauty of his cousin, Margaret Parker. He was at this time at school at Dulwich, where his studies were so absurdly interfered with by his mother's indulgence, that in 1801 he was re

Augusta Ada Byron

From an Engraving by Stone after an
Original Drawing

moved by his guardian, Lord Carlisle, to Harrow. Here Byron was greatly benefited, morally and intellectually, by the discipline of Dr. Drury. At Harrow he was turbulent and capricious, yet irregularly ardent in his studies. and civilised by warm and valuable friendships. In his holidays, which were commonly spent with his mother, he became intimate with Mary Ann Chaworth of Annesley, to whom in. 1803 he became passionately attached; but in the summer of 1805 she married a local squire. Byron, a few weeks later, was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in July 1808 he took his degree. At the university he developed more athletic tastes than at school, and shot, rode, and boxed with skill: he had the reputation of being "a young man of tumultuous passions." After a false start in November 1806, Byron collected his juvenile poems again and issued them privately in January 1807; two months later he published from the Newark press the Hours of Idleness. He was now nominally at Cambridge, and fitfully hard at work, but between whiles sowing wild oats

VOL. IV.

H

with much parade and effrontery, and posing as "a perfect Timon, not nineteen." In 1808 Byron left Cambridge for good, and settled at Newstead, and in 1809 made his first appearance,

Newstead Abbey

From a Drawing by W. Westaii

not a favourable one, in the House of Lords. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was now published, and proved an instant success. A final revel at Newstead Abbey was suddenly broken up in June 1809, and Byron left England with Hobhouse, intending to travel in Persia and India. The friends saw something of Portugal and Spain, and in the autumn arrived in Turkey, to spend the

winter in Greece. The poem of Childe Harold accompanied the wanderings of which it became the record; the second canto was finished at Smyrna in March 1810, and Byron passed on to Constantinople. The next twelve months were spent in travel and adventure, and in the composition of masses of verse: in July 1811, with "a collection of marbles and skulls and hemlock and tortoises and servants," Byron returned to England. Before he could reach Newstead his mother was dead. For the next eighteen months the life of Byron offers no points of signal interest, but in February 1812 his active literary career began with the first instalment of Childe Harold; it was followed, in 1813, by The Waltz, The Giaour, and The Bride of Abydos; in 1814 by The Corsair, Lara, and the Ode to Napoleon; and in 1815 by Hebrew Melodies; and in 1816 by The Siege of Corinth and Parisina. These dates mark the first outbreak of Byron's immense popularity. He became at once the only possible competitor of Scott, with whom this rivalry did not prevent his forming a friendship highly to the credit of both, though they did not actually meet until the spring of 1815, when, "like the old heroes in Homer, we exchanged gifts; I [says Scott] gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, . . . and Byron sent

The Countess Guiccioli

me a large sepulchral vase of silver full of dead men's bones." Women were not so platonically moved by the "pale, proud" poet; they noted him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." With all his fame and all his conquests