Whatever Byron wrote was unhesitatingly published and read, whether good or evil, whatever were those follies and defiances which excluded him from the best society; and it is a matter of surprise to me that any noted and wealthy publisher could be found, in respectable and conventional England, venal enough to publish perhaps the most corrupting poem in our language, worse than anything which Boccaccio wrote for his Italian readers, or anything which plainspoken Fielding and the dramatists of the reign of Charles II. ever allowed to go into print; for though they were coarser in their language, they were not so seductive in their spirit, and did not poison the soul like "Don Juan," the very name of which has become a synonym for extreme depravity. That abominable poem was read because Lord Byron wrote it, and because its immorality was slightly veiled by the beauty of the language, even when a copy could not be found on the table of any respectable drawingroom, and the name of the author was seldom mentioned except with stern and honest censure. It is perhaps fair to quote Murray's own words, throwing the responsibility on the public: "They talked of his immoral writings; but there is a whole row of sermons glued to my shelf. I hate the sight of them. Why don't they buy those?" A fair enough retort; and yet, like the newspaper purveyors of the records of

vice in our own day, the publisher was responsible for making the vile stuff accessible, and thus debasing the public taste.

How different was Byron's painting of Spanish life from that of the immortal Cervantes, whom Lowell places among the five master geniuses of the world! In "Don Quixote" there is not a sentence which does not exalt woman, or which degrades man. A lofty ideal of purity and chivalrous honor permeates every page, even in the most ludicrous scenes. The whole work blazes with wit, and with the wisdom of a proverbial philosophy, uttered by the ignorant squire of a fanatical and bewildered knight; but amidst the practical jokes and follies of all the characters in that marvellous work of fiction, we see also a moral beauty, idealized of course, such as was rivalled only in Spanish art in the Madonnas of Murillo. I believe that in the imaginary sketches of Spanish life as portrayed by Byron, slanders and lies deface the poem from beginning to end. Who is the best authority for truthfulness in the description of Spanish people, Cervantes or Byron? The spiritual loftiness portrayed in the lives of Spanish heroes and heroines, mixed up as it was with the most ludicrous pictures of common life, has made the Spaniard's work of fiction one of the most treasured and enduring monuments of human fame; whereas the insulting innuendoes of the English poet

have gone far to rob him of the glory which he had justly won in his earlier productions, and to make his name a doubt. If, in the course of generations yet to come, the evil which Byron did by that one poem alone shall be forgotten in the services he rendered to our literature by other works, which cannot die, then he may some day be received into the Pantheon of the benefactors of mind.

I would speak with less vehemence in reference to those poems which are generally supposed to be permeated with defiance, scorn, and misanthropy. In "Manfred" and "Cain," it was with Byron a work of art to describe the utterances of impious spirits against the sovereign rule of God. Had he not fallen from high estate as an interpreter of the soul, the critics might have seen here nothing more to condemn than in some of the Grecian tragedies, many passages in the "Paradise Lost," and in the general spirit of "Faust." It is no proof that he was a blasphemer in his heart because he painted blasphemy. To describe a wanderer on the face of the earth, driven hither and thither by pursuing vengeance as the first recorded murderer, the poet was obliged by all the rules of art to put such sentiments into his mouth as accorded with his unrepented crime and his dreadful agonies of mind and soul. Where is the proof that they were his own agonies, remorse, despair? Surely, we may pardon

in Byron what we excuse in Goethe in the delinea

the great creations which

tion of unique characters, belong to the realm of the imagination alone. The imputation that the sayings of his fallen fiends were the cherished sentiments of the poet himself, may have been one cause of his contempt for the average intelligence of his countrymen, and for their inveterate and incurable prejudices. Nothing in Dante is more intense and concentrated in language than the malediction of Eve upon her fratricidal son:

"May the grass wither from thy feet! the woods
Deny thee shelter! earth a home! the dust

A grave! the Sun his light! and Heaven her God!"

Yet the reader feels the naturalness of this bitter cursing of her own son by the frenzied mother. How could a great artist like Byron put sentiments into the mouth of Cain such as would be harmless in the essays of a country parson? If he painted Lucifer, he must make him speak like Lucifer, not like a theological professor. Nothing could be more ungenerous and narrow than to abuse Byron for a dramatic poem in which some of his characters were fiends rather than men. We have no more right to say that he was an infidel because Cain or Lucifer blasphemed, than to say that Goethe was an atheist because Mephistopheles denied God.

If Byron had avowed atheistical opinions in letters or conversations, that would be another thing; but there is no evidence that he did, and much to the contrary. A few months before he died he was visited by a pious crank, who out of curiosity or Christian zeal sought to know his theological views. Byron treated him with the greatest courtesy, and freely communicated his opinions on religious subjects,

from which it would appear that he differed from church people generally only on the matter of eternal punishment, which he did not believe was consistent with infinite love or infinite justice. Perhaps it would have been wiser if he had not written "Cain" at all, considering how many readers there are without brains, and how large was the class predisposed to judge him harshly in everything. No doubt he was irreligious and sceptical, but it does not follow from this that he was atheistical or blasphemous.

There is doubtless a misanthropic vein in all Byron's later poetry which is not wholesome for many people to read, especially in "Manfred," one of the bitterest of his productions by reason of sorrows and disappointments and misrepresentations. It was Byron's misfortune to appear worse than he really was, owing to his unconcealed contempt for the opinions of mankind. Yet he could not complain that he reaped what he had not sown. Some of his biographers thought him