THE SIXTH PERIOD.

The Modern and Victorian Age.

CHAPTER XXX.

BYRON, MOORE, SHELLEY, KEATS, CAMPBELL.

LORD BYRON.

"Never had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy, and despair.”—T. B. Macaulay.

"I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind. We met for an hour or two almost daily in Mr. Murray's drawing-room, and found a great deal to say to each other. His reading did not seem to me to

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have been very extensive, either in poetry or history. Having the advantage of him in that respect, and possessing a good competent share of such reading as is little read, I was sometimes able to put under his eye objects which had for him the interest of novelty." - Walter Scott.

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Byron's poetry is great-great- it makes him truly great: he has not so much greatness in himself." Thomas Campbell.

"To this day English critics are unjust to him. If ever there was a violent and madly sensitive soul, but incapable of being otherwise; ever agitated but in an inclosure without issue; predisposed to poetry by its innate fire, but limited by its natural barriers to a single kind of poetry-it was Byron's."- H. A. Taine.

THE influence exerted by Byron on the taste and sentiment of Europe has not yet passed away, and, though no longer pervasive, it is not likely to be effaced. He has called himself "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme"; and there is some similarity between the sudden

splendor of his literary career and the meteoric rise and domination of the first Bonaparte. Both were the offspring of revolution; and both, after reigning with absolute power for a time, were deposed from their supremacy. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was born in London, the son of a profligate aristocrat and of Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress. His mother had a temper so passionate and uncontrolled that she often seemed insane. Her dowry was dissipated by her worthless husband, and she, with her boy, was obliged to live for several years in comparative poverty. When he was about eleven years old the death of his grand-uncle, a misanthropic recluse, made him heir to one of the most ancient baronial titles in England. With the title he inherited the noble residence of Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, with small means to maintain it. He was sent first to Harrow, and afterwards to Cambridge, where he became notorious for the eccentricities of his conduct. He was a greedy though desultory reader, and his imagination was especially attracted to Oriental history and travels.

In his twentieth year, Byron published a small volume of fugitive poems entitled Hours of Idleness, by Lord Byron, a Minor. An unfavorable criticism of this work in the Edinburgh Review threw him into a frenzy of rage. He set about taking his revenge in the satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, including in a storm of invective, not only his enemies of the Edinburgh Review, but almost all the literary men of the day,- Walter Scott, Moore, and many others from whom he had received no provocation whatever. He soon became ashamed of his unreasoning violence; tried, but vainly, to suppress the poem; and, in after life, became the friend and sincere admirer of some whom he had lampooned. Byron traveled extensively, filling his mind with the life and scenery

of Greece, Turkey, and the East, and accumulating those stores of descriptive material which his poems displayed with splendor. The first two cantos of Childe Harold took the public by storm, and placed the young poet at the summit of social and literary popularity. "I awoke one morning," he says, "and found myself famous." In rapid succession followed The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara. Scott had drawn his material from feudal and Scottish life; Byron broke new ground in describing the manners, scenery, and passions of the East and of Greece. Returning to England in his dawning fame, the poet became the lion of the day, and passed his time in fashionable dissipation. He married a lady of fortune; but the union was unhappy, and in about a year Lady Byron suddenly quitted her husband. Deeply wounded by the scandal of this separation, the poet again left England; and thenceforth his life was passed on the Continent, in Switzerland, in Italy, and in Greece. He solaced his embittered spirit with attacks upon characters and traditions that his countrymen held sacred. While at Geneva he produced the third canto of Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and The Lament of Tasso. Between 1818 and 1821 he was living at Venice and Ravenna; and was writing Mazeppa, the first five cantos of Don Juan, and most of his tragedies, as Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, Werner, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. In 1823 he determined to devote his fortune and his influence to the aid of the Greeks, then struggling for independence. He arrived at Missolonghi at the beginning of 1824; where, after giving himself with ardor to the revolution, he died at the early age of thirty-six.

"Childe Harold." Childe Harold consists of a series of monologues put into the mouth of a jaded and misanthropic voluptuary, who seeks refuge from his misery in the contemplation of lovely historic scenes. The first canto describes Portugal and Spain; the second carries the

wanderer to Greece, Albania, and the Ægean Archipelago; the third, the finest of all, includes Switzerland, Belgium, and the Rhine, gives splendid pictures of the beauties of Nature, and musings on the great men whose renown has thrown a glory over those enchanting scenes. It contains the magnificent description of the battle of Waterloo. In the fourth canto the reader is borne over the fairest part of Italy, Venice, Ferrara, Florence, Rome, and Ravenna, -while the immortal dead, and the masterpieces of painting and sculpture, are described to him with an intensity of feeling that had never before been shown in descriptive poetry. The poem is written in the Spenserian stanza. At the beginning the poet strives after the quaint and archaic manner of the Faery Queene; but he soon throws off the embarrassing restraint. In intensity of feeling, in richness and harmony of expression, and in an imposing tone of misanthropic reflection, Childe Harold stands alone in our literature.

Qualities of his Other Poems. The romantic tales of Byron are marked by like peculiarities of thought and method, though they differ in kind and degree. The Giaour, The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa, Parisina, The Prisoner of Chillon, and The Bride of Abydos are written in that irregular and flowing versification which Scott brought into fashion; while The Corsair, Lara, and The Island are in the regular heroic measure. These poems are, in general, fragmentary, made up of intense moments of passion and action. In none of his works does Byron show the power of delineating variety of character. But two personages appear in all his poems,-a man whose unbridled passions have desolated the heart, and left it cynical, contemptuous, and despairing, yet occasionally

feeling kindly emotions with a singular intensity. The woman is the woman of the East,- devoted and loving, but loving with unreasoning animal attachment. In all these poems we meet with tender, animated, profound passages. In Beppo and The Vision of Judgment Byron has ventured upon the gay, airy, and satirical. The former of these poems is exquisitely playful and sparkling. The Vision, an attack upon Southey, though somewhat ferocious, is exceedingly brilliant. Among the less familiar of the longer poems are The Lament of Tasso, and The Prophecy of Dante, the latter written in the difficult terza rima, and the first attempt of any English poet to employ that measure. The Dream, in some respects the most touching of the minor poems, is the narrative of his early and unfortunate passion for Mary Chaworth.

Don Juan is in some respects the most characteristic of Byron's poems. It professes to give the youthful career of the Spanish Don Juan de Tenorio, the atheist and voluptuary. Byron carries his hero through various adventures, serious and comic, exhibits his fine powers of description, and remains unfettered by any necessities of time and place. In its unfinished state the poem consists of sixteen cantos, and there is no reason why it should not have been indefinitely extended. Its merits are richness of imagery, witty allusion, and, above all, frequent and easy transitions. The morality is low and selfish; but, in spite of much flippancy, the poem contains profound satire.

His Dramatic Works. The dramatic works of Byron are cold and severe. The finest of them is Manfred, a series of soliloquies, in which the mysterious hero describes Nature, and pours forth his despair and his self-pity. The more exclusively