which celebrated nothing more moving than the praises of" august Athena," or "stern Albania's hills," should have produced so great a commotion at once in society, and among the general world of readers, is difficult to understand. Greater poems have had very much less effect, and yet have been well received;-this attained. in a moment the universal attention, and dazzled all who beheld it,-springing suddenly like a comet out of the vapours.

It is difficult, we have said, to understand this instantaneous fame; but, indeed, it is evident enough upon what it was founded. The secret of its power was in the hero who traversed vaguely those classic countries, giving a certain mystery and interest even to scenes in which his figure was imagined rather than seen—and in the revelation of him which occupied the beginning of the poem: a brief effective sketch, original and captivating to the popular imagination, which never in English literature had met with anything like this embodiment of youthful tragedy before. Réné had preceded him in France, and Werter in Germany, but "Childe Harold" was different from both. He was the symbol less of revolt against established laws than of that personal grievance which is felt so bitterly in youth, when things do not go as we wish. Not the loss of a Lotte or a Mary, but wild despite at his own insignificance, a fierce disgust with the world which did not do him homage, nor cared very deeply whither he went or came, was in every line of the picture. It is a picture of youth awakening from its first wild burst of enjoyment and

confidence in itself, to the bitter sense that its pleasures are naught, and itself of no particular importance in the economy of the Universe. The pang with which he gazes wildly round to see the indifference of gods and men to his weal or inclination, the calm routine which goes on unmoved, howsoever the young hero may suffer and even if he sinks altogether in his struggle to have everything and enjoy everything, is, in its astonishment, its fury, its pathos of self-pity, a very real pang; and the force of tragic superiority to the cruel world and all its ways, even the pretence of having earned that world's anathema by guilt as mysterious as the suffering, is comprehensible enough to the heart, a natural refuge for pride deeply wounded and mortified feeling. But the image was new to the age, and affected it in a powerful way. It was the first time this young misanthrope, this mysterious cynic, this proud and scornful rebel, sufferer, and outcast, had been put in bodily shape before the world. And its attraction was increased by the fact that, amid all its truth to nature, there was a subtle half-conscious fiction running through every line. No despair could have been so black and profound that did not conceal a secret consciousness of unlimited hope behind, and the very grandeur with which that sublime melodramatic figure averted his eyes from all delights, made it more certain that, when he chose to "take a thought and mend," all these delights were yet well within his reach. Thus the mingling of the fictitious and the real, the sincerity and good faith of present passion with all the

casuistry and artifice of fictitious sentiment, gave an additional attraction. The guilt, and grandeur, and hopeless misery were all alike sham, yet the feeling was true and this artificial character, if we may be permitted to employ a paradox, made the conception more real, and helped, as nothing else could, to express the strange chaos of wilfulness and waywardness, of suffering and satisfaction, the complacent masquerading and genuine misery which are involved in the first tragedy of youth.

This publication changed life and the world to Byron. It was in February 1812 that it took place, and all doors were thrown open to him. In 1815 he married. In 1816, a year after, he left England, separated from his wife, a broken man, with neither hope nor possibility left him, so far as appeared, of ever making up with the world or presenting himself again in society. Thus his entire career in England was limited to four years, beginning in total obscurity and ending in general reprobation. As it is almost incredible that a young man of his rank, not to speak of his genius-for that was at the time unrevealed should have been so friendless and forlorn to start with, so it is hard to understand his entire abandonment afterwards. He was not without partisans to offer pleas in his favour, and breathe for him all the commonplace and well-worn excuses which are supposed to account for the follies of genius. But the general impression was as entirely against him as ever public opinion was; and this brief space of unbounded applause, and equally boundless disapproba

tion, represented all his life in England, the entire cycle of his rising and falling. A more extraordinary career could not have been imagined. The violent onslaught which, while still utterly unknown, he had made upon almost every famous individual of his contemporaries, had been generously and fully forgiven to the author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, with a magnanimity which, so far as we know, is quite unrivalled in history. The most royal pardon had been granted to him with acclamation, and the fairest chance a man could have, fully accorded. Society, which had been coldly unconscious of his existence, opened its doors wide to the young poet who had so many claims on its consideration. Without entering in a manner totally inconsistent with our purpose into the scandalous chronicles of the time, which was as unlovely a moment as can be found in social history, we cannot give the reader any account of the life of Byron in this brief epitome of his existence. It was a lawless life, bound by no rule of principle, full, it is to be supposed, of enjoyment, full of remorse, of pecuniary miseries and wild expenditure, of passions and separations, all headlong, unregulated, prodigal. In no way is the picture of the young poet an attractive one. Moore says everything for him that a counsel retained for the defence could say, but never is able, evidently, to divest himself of the sense that his client has a very poor case, and that in reality there is very little to be said. His own letters and journals seem to us superficial in the highest degree, and give little idea of

anjing ban dhe fruta di a restless TUTTE

& mums resort of event, and

if the Lany-song of wonery, the shatter of a misy eie in which there is nothing great but the names that open and reusppear, bmx show line of either thingir e feeling above the level of a frydous young man of fustite Te Are TeensTimed in these SLTS to the discretion wild custe dut everything purely personal and lides mader asterisks every asin ta might wound er grieve, and it is diffent in the face of the damaging revelations wie of late have sided some great memories, to objem to the reticence which, by his time, to realers thangnaizmed with excremporary and Babblings, ez velige the whole guestila of Byron's He and relations before his manage in a mist. It seems doubtful which is best and whether entire Cease wood not be better than either indecent candour or tantalising concealm÷ITS.

talk

This at least we know, that Brza Eved a life espalle, perhaps of excuse, but not of justification; that after having dissipated the criitary prospects of existence on that high level be had another chance in marriage—and somehow, more dolorously, more shamefully still falled in that also and so far as England was concerned in life &ltogether. There are times in which concealment is the worst injury that can be done a man, as there are also cases in which disclosure is a crime. We are inespalle of saying in which category Byron's story is to be placed. His wife is one of the greatest mysteries of recent times. Aimired and almost worshipped by an adoring circle