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CHAPTER XXV.

BYRON, MOORE, SHELLEY, KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, LANDOR, HOOD, BROWNING.

LORD BYRON.

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

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"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 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.

"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 enclosure 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

HE influence exerted by Byron on the taste and sentiment of Europe has not yet passed away, and, though far from being so pervading as it once was, it is not likely to be ever effaced. He called himself, in one of his poems, "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme;" and there is some similarity between the suddenness and splendor of his literary career, and the meteoric rise and domination of the First Bonaparte. They were both, in their respective departments, the offspring of revolution; and both, after reigning with absolute power for some time, were deposed from their supremacy. Their reigns will leave traces in the political, and in the literary history of the nine

teenth century. George Gordon, Lord Byron (17881824) (264-277), was born in London, and was the son of an unprincipled profligate and of a Scottish heiress. His mother had a temper so passionate and uncontrolled that, in its capricious alternations of fondness and violence, she seemed insane. Her dowry was speedily dissipated by her worthless husband, and she, with her boy, was obliged to live for several years in comparative poverty. He was about eleven years old when the death of his granduncle, an eccentric and misanthropic recluse, made him heir-presumptive to the baronial title of one of the most ancient aristocratic houses in England. With the title, he inherited large, though embarrassed estates, and the noble picturesque residence of Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham. He was sent first to Harrow School, and afterwards to Trinity College, Cambridge. At college he became notorious for the irregularities of his conduct. He was a greedy though desultory reader; and his imagination was especially attracted to Oriental history and travels.

While at Cambridge, in his twentieth year, Byron made his first literary attempt, in the publication of 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 instantly set about taking his revenge in the satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he involved in one common 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 now went abroad to travel, and filled his mind with the picturesque life and scenery of Greece, Turkey, and the

East, accumulating those stores of character and description which he poured forth with such royal splendor in his poems. The first two cantos of Childe Harold took the public by storm, and at once placed the young poet at the summit of social and literary popularity. "I awoke one morning," he says, "and found myself famous." These cantos were followed in rapid succession by The Giaour, (268, 269), The Bride of Abydos (270), The Corsair (271), and Lara. Scott had drawn his material from feudal and Scottish life; Byron broke up new ground in describing the manners, scenery, and wild passions of the East and of Greece-a region as picturesque as that of his rival, as well known to him by experience, and as new and fresh to the public he addressed. Returning to England in the full blaze of his dawning fame, the poet became the lion of the day. His life was passed in fashionable dissipation. He married Miss Milbanke, a lady of fortune; but the union was an unhappy one. In about a year Lady Byron suddenly quitted her husband. Her reasons for taking this step will ever remain a mystery. Deeply wounded by the scandal of this separation, the poet again left England; and thenceforth his life was passed uninterruptedly on the Continent, in Switzerland, in Italy, and in Greece, where he solaced his embittered spirit with misanthropical attacks upon all that his countrymen held sacred, and gradually plunged deeper and deeper into a slough of sensuality and vice. While at Geneva he produced the third canto of Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon (273), Manfred (274), and The Lament of Tasso. Between 1818 and 1821 he was residing 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 many of these poems the influence of Shelley's literary manner and philosophical tenets is traceable. At this time he was grossly dissipated,

and associated with persons of low character. In 1823 he determined to devote his fortune and his influence to the aid of the Greeks, then struggling for their independence. He arrived at Missolonghi at the beginning of 1824; where, after giving striking indications of his practical talents, as well as of his ardor and self-sacrifice, he died on the 19th of April of the same year, at the early age of thirty-six.

Childe Harold, his most remarkable poem, consists of a series of gloomy but intensely poetical monologues, put into the mouth of a jaded and misanthropic voluptuary, who seeks refuge from his misery in the contemplation of the lovely and historic scenes of travel. The first canto describes Portugal and Spain; the second carries the wanderer to Greece, Albania and the Aegean Archipelago; in the third, the finest and intensest of them all, Switzerland, Belgium and the Rhine, give opportunities not only for splendid pictures of the consummate beauty of nature, but also for musings on Napoleon, Voltaire, Rousseau and the great men whose renown has thrown a new glory over those enchanting scenes; in the fourth canto the reader is borne successively over the fairest parts of Italy-Venice, Ferrara, Florence, Rome, and Ravenna-and the immortal dead, and the master-pieces of painting and sculpture, are described to him with an intensity of feeling that had never before been shown in descriptive poetry.

The first two cantos are somewhat feeble and tame as compared with the strength and massive power of the two later, which are the productions of his more mature faculties. The third canto contains the magnificent description of the Battle of Waterloo, with bitter and melancholy but sublime musings on the vanity of military fame. The poem is written in the Spenserian stanza. In the beginning the poet makes an effort to give somewhat of the quaint and archaic character of the Fairy Queen; but he soon throws off the useless and embarrassing restraint. In intensity of

feeling, in richness and harmony of expression, and in an imposing tone of gloomy, sceptical, and misanthropic reflection, Childe Harold stands alone in our literature.

The romantic tales of Byron are all marked by similar peculiarities of thought and treatment, though they differ in the kind and degree of their respective excellences. The Giaour (268), The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa, Parisina, The Prisoner of Chillon (273), 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. They are made up of intensely interesting moments of passion and action. Neither in these nor in any of his works does Byron show the least power of delineating variety of character. There are but two personages in all his poems-a man in whom unbridled passions have desolated the heart, and left it hard and impenetrable; a man contemptuous of his kind, sceptical and despairing, yet occasionally feeling the softer emotions with a singular intensity. The woman is the woman of the East-sensual, devoted, and loving, but loving with the unreasoning attachment of the lower animals. These elements of character, meagre and unnatural as they are, are however set before us with such power that the young and inexperienced reader invariably loses sight of their contradictions. In all these poems we meet with inimitable descriptions, tender, animated, or profound: thus the famous comparison of enslaved Greece to a corpse in The Giaour, the night-scene and the battle-scene in The Corsair and Lara, the eve of the storming of the city in The Siege of Corinth, and the fiery energy of the attack in the same poem, the exquisite opening lines in Parisina, besides a multitude of others, might be adduced to prove Byron's extraordinary genius in communicating to his pictures the coloring of his own feelings and character.

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