There was now, however, to blaze upon the busy world of society, with Mr. Rogers in St. James's Place twinkling a very mild little taper across its darkness, and Canning and Hookham Frere carrying into statesmanship only a pungent recollection of verse which was satire rather than poetry, and Gifford uttering from his corner, in the same breath with the Baviads and Mæviads, a sentimental song which was not much less ornate and feeble than the chirpings of the poor little Della Cruscans whom he slew-a sudden meteor of the first magnitude dazzling the unaccustomed eyes of Town. A child born of two unruly houses, English and Scotch, brought up as badly as ever unfortunate boy was, spoiled alike by good fortune and bad, a lord, a braggart, and a genius, passionately wrong-headed, self-adoring, yet selfdisgusted, poor, extravagant, dissipated, and lonely, a kind of young outcast from humanity, yet favourite of fortune, had come through doubtful episodes of restraint at school and college, and wild license and wandering elsewhere, to man's estate. He had published the first flowers of his youth in an idle volume, and then, stung to the very marrow of his bones by unnecessary severity of criticism thereupon, had revenged himself in a trenchant and fiery satire, a very different kind of stuff from the Baviads, and was now come back after various travels, with a trumpery manuscript in the same vein, which he called "Hints from Horace," and was eager to publish, and a neglected bundle of Spenserian verses of which he thought nothing, but which turned out to be no less

a thing than the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This young Lord Byron was twentythree, and one of the most forlorn beings imaginable, though possessed of wonderful gifts of fortune without friends or family, or a home, or anything to make up to him for the precocious and miserable knowledge of "life" in its worst aspect, which he had been so unfortunate as to acquire. His school and college friends were dead or estranged; relations he had scarcely any; his mother, for whom, so long as she lived, he had felt little affection, died immediately after his return from his wanderings; and his manner of life, before he set out upon these wanderings, had been such as to prejudice most of the people who knew him against him—indeed, this would seem to have been one of the objects of his uncomfortable, unlovely, and unenjoyed life, to make so much stir at least, that everybody should think as badly as possible of the hapless young reprobate. It was not a great ambition, but he would seem to have succeeded in it. When he took his seat in the House of Lords there was not a creature to stand by him, not another peer-and he loved peers-to give him the countenance which a young man needs. Unfortunate young Byron! He was proud, very conscious of his own rank, and eager for the deference it ought to have brought him. But the doors of society, which we are apt to think so very ready to open before such a young hero, remained obstinately closed in his case. He had nobody to introduce him, or teach him how to get the entrée, and he found the

homage he loved only among servants and humble country folk. And being but a boy, and far from wise, he had made a little flourish of self-importance about his peerage in the little book that he had innocently issued to a hard world. Jeffrey's review, after all, was nothing so very dreadful. Any graceful young lordling of the present day who should put forth his "Hours of Idleness" would get as hard or harder from the Saturday Review, and would in all likelihood bear it like a man without gratifying his critics by any outcry of pain or vengeance. But criticism was a new art in those days, and though no more ferocious (we think) than now, was much more keenly felt. And the Edinburgh had the art of planting wounds so that they should sting and burn. The reader must not suppose, however, that young Byron and his pretty little poems (for they were no more) had the honour of being the subject of such an elaborate article as those we now see in the great Reviews. Such small deer were not exposed to pursuit so lengthened. The Review in its earlier stages admitted articles of very varied extent, and that which the young poet so deeply resented was not longer than a literary newspaper would devote to a similar offender now.

But what an outburst of young passion and energy was in the reply! "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is not a great poem. If it were possible to drop it out of Byron's life and works, we believe his lovers would always have been glad to do so, and he himself not the least contented; but it could not be

dropped out of a literary history. Never was there a more remarkable example of "how it strikes a contemporary." It is always a matter of curiosity and interest to get at the opinion of youth, and to form an idea what the tendencies of the time are by the likings of its future masters—especially when these are the most highly endowed and educated of their day. Young Byron, indeed, was not of the latter class; his education was imperfect, his information desultory and chaotic, and his university had conveyed to him but a small share of those humanising influences with which we are fondly apt to credit that seat of learning. But there was not such another literary genius in all the ranks of English youth, and he, if any one, should have seen and appreciated the nobler gifts, which had come to full development just as he reached that opening day in which everything that is beautiful in nature is most beautiful to the young seer. How strange is the difference between this high probability and the real state of affairs! The young Byron, the new poet, he who should have recognised by instinct his immortal brethren, vindicates above all things else the blindness of human intelligence, the obstinacy of prejudice, the old-fashionedness and conventionalism of youth. Nothing so artificial, so prejudiced, so blindly conservative could be, as the violent charge he makes in hot exasperation of vanity and injured amour propre against all who were before him in the lists of honour all, or almost all, the exceptions being as edifying as the abuse. An indiscriminate assault upon

all sorts and conditions of poets, Coleridge and Monk Lewis, Wordsworth and Grahame, all holding about the same place, apparently, in the young champion's eyes, is more remarkable than the rush at Jeffrey which was comprehensible and perhaps not illegitimate. Scott comes in for the most prolonged abuse of all, as "Apollo's venal son," as a "hireling bard" with a "prostituted muse," as one of the poets who "rack their brains for lucre not for fame." Then comes "ballad-mongering Southey," on whom he is scarcely so severe, though he means to be so, for indeed poor Southey, though he produced "annual strains" to take the field like armies, never was lucky enough to get half-a-crown a line. "Vulgar Wordsworth," whom the young avenger in all sincerity does not seem to think worth his steel, is described as "the meanest object of the lowly group," and his "verse of all but childish prattle void :" and Coleridge "to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear," as "the laureate of the long-ear'd kind:" while poor Mr. Cottle in Bristol, the gently garrulous bookseller, to whom we owe many pleasant reminiscences if we have all forgotten his poetry, comes in, in the absolute absence of all perspective, for rather more remark than either of these preceding poets. "Smug Sydney," "blundering Brougham," "paltry Pillans," are more naturally, as being Edinburgh reviewers, the object of this schoolboy vituperation. But at last the young man in the crowd he has raised about him falls in with some one whom he can praise. "Neglected genius! let me turn to you," he cries.