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"Poor, proud Byron! sad as grave,
And salt as life! forlornly brave,

And quivering with the dart he drave,"

is a just description of one whose griefs were so real, that even his laughter dies into a sob, and his passionate fire is quenched in tears. How could a man be otherwise than wretched who believed in such men and such women as his poetry presented?-creatures at once so mighty and so mean, so proud and yet so weak, so exacting yet so unyielding, so sinful yet so severe, so fond and so false, so beautiful and so deceptive.

Lord Byron did not die in absolute youth, but he died before middle age had calmed his passions and matured his judgment.* His poetry took in a range of about twenty-one years, from the age of sixteen to thirty-seven. That it influenced and yet will influence the mind of the age-that it has a fixed and high place in English literature -no one can doubt who either remembers, reads, or reflects on the mental aspects of the time.

The habit of comparing Lord Byron with Wordsworth, making one the standard by which to judge the other, is as illogical as unjust; all pertaining to them, personally and relatively, was essentially different. What the thoughtful mind has to note is the fact, that great as are the di

* Lord Byron died 1824, aged 37.

versities of matter, those of mind are yet greater; and that the world is instructed, not by sameness, but variety.

Sir Walter Scott, who with Lord Byron is the most prominent personage in the literary tableau of the age, was well described as "a healthy man." There was a moral and mental symmetry, a proportion and equipoise, manifested equally in his poetic and prose writings. There was neither too much of the active nor the contemplative, just enough of the one to benefit the other. He fed his imagination at pure sources-the old English poets; and without any philosophising on the matter, he went back to the olden time for subjects, and presented them so picturesquely, that all admired the descriptive power, quite as much as the easy tripping music of his pleasant verse. His works are so universally known and read, that comment is unnecessary, and quotation superfluous.

Campbell is the last of our great modern poets who adhered, in the structure of his verse, to the model of Pope, and who sedulously aimed at a perfect polish and correctness according to the rules of eighteenth-century criticism. His "Pleasures of Hope," his "Gertrude of Wyoming," and even yet more his noble lyrics, rank with the very finest productions of the age. Those who knew him best testified that his fault was a tendency to

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touch and retouch, to peruse and alter, until he injured rather than improved. He sometimes corrected into tameness. The noble line in "Hohenlinden,"

"Far flashed the red artillery,"

was with difficulty saved from his altering, and ofttimes injuring process.

While this tendency might have been in his case carried to excess, it was honourable to the poet. The facilities for publication in the present age are so numerous, that writers are tempted to be on too familiar terms with the public, and to give readers, through the press, slipshod, careless utterances, that would scarcely do for the postoffice. To emulate Campbell's genius would be an impossibility; to imitate his example in this respect would often be an advantage to both writers and readers.

There never was a time when our poetic literature abounded more in orientalisms than during the first twenty-five years of the present century. Eastern manners, morals, mind, and life were constantly described. Lord Byron did not alone aid in the formation and spread of this taste. His gifted friend and biographer, Thomas Moore, contributed his share in the composition of Eastern tales, full of all the gorgeous splendour and redundant luxury of the region they described. In

fluency and ease, perfect finish, luxuriance, and happy turns of expression, no poet of his time surpassed Moore. His own genial nature made him too often mistake pleasure for the business of the poet, and his exuberant fancy heaped up sweets until the reader was ready to exclaim, in his own words,

"There's a beauty for ever unchangingly bright,

Like the long sunny lapse of a summer day's light,
Shining on - shining on, by no shadow made tender,
Till love falls asleep in that sameness of splendour."

Yet, notwithstanding this luxurious, superfluous affluence of sweets, whenever patriotism and tenderness need words, some of Moore's stanzas will rise to the lips as most appropriate, expressive, and affecting.

CHAP. XX.

LITERATURE

AMONG THE PEOPLE.

POETS

AND PROSE

WRITERS OF THE POOR.-ASPECTS OF LITERATURE IN THE
PRESENT TIME. LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS. THOUGHTS

ON READING.

Π

THERE has been a great deal both of insolence and vulgarity displayed in the wonder expressed when a man in humble life has contributed to the treasures of our literature. Many, in reading the poems of Burns, were constantly thinking rather of the ploughman than the poet; and instead of feeling additional reverence for one who had known the sterner discipline of life, and manfully endured it, a stupid wonder that such thoughts should have visited a peasant has been the uppermost feeling; forgetting that the thoughts would have been as rare and beautiful if they had visited a prince. The words "republic of letters," though a frequent phrase on the lip, is not so intelligible, it seems, to the mind. If that phrase were believed as embodying a fact, there would be less wonder and more reverence in studying the literature contributed by men and women of the people.

A reading public has led, as a tolerably necessary consequence, to a writing public—and, for

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