respects no two men could be less alike, and it might almost seem as if they belonged to different worlds. Yet from the poetical standpoint they had much in common, and Southey did not exaggerate when he said he would go a hundred miles to see the author of "Gebir," neither did Landor wilfully overstate his admiration when he said of "Roderick," "There is no poem in existence that I shall read so often." "Gebir," thus dear to Southey, won also the high admiration of Shelley. It is splendid in parts but not as a whole, and its obscurity, due to extreme condensation of style, will repel a reader whose purpose is not fixed enough to support him in the study. The same criticism may be passed on his "Count Julian,” a subject which in different forms has been treated by Scott and Southey. Milton said that in writing prose he was using his left hand, and this was Landor's position in writing verse. And yet, although this be true, it seems almost unjust to say it, as we recall many of the short poems through which this strong, passionate-natured man uttered the tenderness of his heart.

[Selections from the writings of Landor, arranged and edited by Sidney Colvin (Macmillan and Co.), belongs to the Golden Treasury Series, and is worthy of it. Landor is the original of Boythorn in Dickens's "Bleak House.]

CHAPTER XVI.

POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

(Continued).

LORD BYRON.

DURING the lifetime of Lord Byron and for a considerable time after his death there was

George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824.

no English poet who
with him in popularity.

could compete He was praised

lavishly and without discrimination, and the critics who blamed him most severely as an immoral writer had no hesitation in admitting that the author of "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" ranked with the greatest poets of the world. And this position Byron holds still upon the Continent, where he is placed next to Shakespeare in the roll of English poets.

In England, however, he has fallen, and I venture to think has fallen permanently, from this high

estate.* Time, one of the most trustworthy of critics, has not proved altogether in favour of this passionate poet. It has taught us that much of his pathos is spurious, that much of what looked like gold is pinchbeck. His egotism fails to create sympathy, his dramatic characters have lost the little vitality which they once possessed, his voice is unmusical, and his grave moral faults repel rather than fascinate a generation that has never felt the glamour of his name. How strong it once was may be made evident by a single illustration. Thomas Carlyle, though he loved heroes, did not care to look for them in the men of his own age. He had never seen Byron, and perhaps this fact may account for what he wrote on hearing of his death. "Poor Byron!-alas, poor Byron! The news of his death came upon my heart like a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother." And Miss Welsh, Carlyle's future wife, wrote: "If they had said the sun or the moon was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with a more awful and dreary

* In what I have to say of Byron in this chapter I know that I run the risk of being called hard names. There is a school of criticism which esteems withering contempt the fittest reply to writers who see defects in the gods of their idolatry-especially when these idols are looked at from a moral standpoint. To say a word against Shelley's conduct, to discover a weak side in his poetry, or to hint that the impurity of Byron's life has fatally injured the quality of his verse, is to run the risk of being assailed with a shower of scornful adjectives

"Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa."

blank in the creation than the words, 'Byron is dead.'"

A similar feeling would probably have been expressed by three-fourths of the educated men and women who appreciated literature and loved poetry in 1824. We cannot share the feeling now, but it is possible to understand it. The youthful imagination of those days had made Byron a hero. His birth, his misfortunes, his physical beauty, his glar. ing faults, and his habit of letting the public into his confidence, fixed attention upon him. The man as well as the poet had very impressive qualities. We shall see what those qualities were when I have sketched in barest outline the painful incidents of his life.

George Gordon Byron had a long and famous pedigree, but his immediate ancestors were not men to be proud of. The fifth lord, known as the "wicked lord," who died about the end of the last century, fought a duel with a kinsman, killed his antagonist and was convicted of manslaughter; the poet's father led a life utterly vicious and unprincipled; and his mother had a temper so unbridled, that she gave way to the most furious bursts of passion, one of which ultimately caused her death. Her treatment of George Gordon, her only child, was injudicious in the extreme; sometimes it was brutal, as when she taunted the boy for being "a lame brat," or flung at his head the first object of which she could lay hold. Never had a poet worse training; and when we remember the vices of his

A

life, we must also remember how infinitely worse off is the child of bad parents than if he were born into the world as one of God's orphans. The boy had warm feelings, and the friends of his Harrow days were the friends of his manhood, but it seemed as though every circumstance conspired to pervert his nature and to make his life unfortunate. lord when ten years old, he had none of the advantages of title and wealth. Mrs. Byron's fortune had been thrown away by her dissolute husband, and Newstead Abbey, the family seat, which was left to the boy almost in a state of ruin, had in after years to be sold to relieve Byron of his difficulties.

While still at Harrow he fell in love with Mary Chaworth, who seems to have amused herself with his affection. "She liked me as a younger brother," he writes, "and treated and laughed at me as a boy. . . . Had I married Miss Chaworth, perhaps the whole tenor of my life would have been different." Four years were spent at Harrow—“ my own dear Harrow-on-the-Hill," he called it—and then Byron went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote his earliest verse. The "Hours of Idleness" gave no indications of future greatness; neither did the poet gain university honours, but by his own confession led a life of dissipation. In 1809 he came of age, took his seat in the House of Lords, and published his satire, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." It was a daring attack upon the critics and poets of the day; full of injustice, as