because he is a lord, set upon him. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun. But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry unless he lives in a garret." Years after, Lady Byron, on being told this, exclaimed, "Ah, if Byron had known. that, he would never have attacked Wordsworth. He went one day to meet him at dinner, and I said, 'Well. how did the young poet get on with the old one?' 'Why, to tell the truth,' said he, 'I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the end, and that was reverence." Similarly, he began by being on good terms with Southey, and after a meeting at Holland House, wrote enthusiastically of his prepossessing appearance.

Byron and the leaders of the so-called Lake School were, at starting, common heirs of the revolutionary spirit; they were, either in their social views or personal feelings, to a large extent influenced by the most morbid, though in some respects the most magnetic, genius of modern France, J. J. Rousseau; but their temperaments were in many respects fundamentally diverse; and the pre-established discord between them ere long began to make itself manifest in their following out widely divergent paths. Wordsworth's return to nature had been preluded by Cowper; that of Byron by Burns. The revival of the one ripened into a restoration of simpler manners and old beliefs; the other was the spirit of the storm. When they had both become recognized powers, neither appreciated the work of the other. A few years after this date Byron wrote of Wordsworth, to a common admirer of both: "I take leave to differ from you as freely as I once agreed with you. His performances, since the Lyrical Ballads, are miserably inadequate to the ability

that lurks within him. There is, undoubtedly, much natural talent spilt over the Excursion; but it is rain upon rocks, where it stands and stagnates; or rain upon sand, where it falls without fertilizing." This criticism with others in like strain, was addressed to Mr. Leigh Hunt, to whom, in 1812, when enduring for radicalism's sake a very comfortable incarceration, Byron had, in company with Moore, paid a courteous visit.

Of the correspondence of this period-flippant, trenchant, or sparkling-few portions are more calculated to excite a smile than the record of his frequent resolutions made, reasseverated, and broken, to have done with literature; even going the length on some occasions of threatening to suppress his works, and, if possible, recall the existing copies. He affected being a man of the world unmercifully, and had a real delight in clever companions who assumed the same rôle. Frequent allusion is made to his intercourse with Erskine and Sheridan : the latter he is never tired of praising, as "the author of the best modern comedy (School for Scandal), the best farce (The Critic), and the best oration (the famous Begum speech) ever heard in this country." They spent many an evening together, and probably cracked many a bottle. It is Byron who tells the story of Sheridan being found in a gutter in a sadly incapable state; and, on some one asking "Who is this?" stammering out "Wilberforce." On one occasion he speaks of coming out of a tavern with the dramatist, when they both found the staircase in a very cork-screw condition and elsewhere, of encountering a Mr. C, who "had no notion of meeting with a bon-vivant in a scribbler," and summed the poet's eulogy with the phrase, "he drinks like a man." Hunt, the tattler, who observed his lordship's habits in

:

Italy, with the microscope of malice ensconced within. the same walls, makes it a charge against his host that he would not drink like a man. Once for all it may be noted, that although there was no kind of excess in which Byron, whether from bravado or inclination, failed occasionally to indulge, he was never for any stretch of time given over, like Burns, to what is technically termed intemperance. His head does not seem to have been strong, and under the influence of stimulants he may have been led to talk a great deal of his dangerous nonsense. But though he could not say, with Wordsworth, that only once, at Cambridge, had his brain been "excited by the fumes of wine," his prevailing sins were in other directions.

CHAPTER VI.

MARRIAGE, AND FAREWELL TO ENGLAND.

"As for poets," says Scott, "I have seen all the best of my time and country, and, though Burns had the most glorious eye imaginable, I never thought any of them would come up to an artist's notion of the character, except Byron. His countenance is a thing to dream of.” Coleridge writes to the same effect, in language even stronger. We have from all sides similar testimony to the personal beauty which led the unhappiest of his devotees to exclaim, "That pale face is my fate!"

Southern critics, as Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have dealt leniently with the poet's relations to the other sex; and Elze extends to him in this regard the same excessive stretch of charity. "Dear Childe Harold," exclaims the German professor, "was positively besieged by women. They have, in truth, no right to complain of him from his childhood he had seen them on their worst side." It is the casuistry of hero-worship to deny that Byron was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but in his prevailing views of their character and claims. "I regard them," he says, in a passage only distinguished from others by more extravagant petulance, "as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are as little in their place at our tables as they would be in our council

chambers. The whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers. I look on them as grown-up children; but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of one of them. The Turks shut up their women, and are much happier; give a woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content."

In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the above passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Shelley. The class whom he was reviling seemed, however, during "the day of his destiny," bent on confirming his judgment by the blindness of their worship. His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and affectation of mysterious. secrets, combined with the magic of his presence to bewitch and bewilder them. The dissenting malcontents, condemned as prudes and blues, had their revenge. Generally, we may say that women who had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales, often to point their fables with. He was by the one set caressed and spoilt, and "beguiled too long;" by the other, "betrayed too late." The recent memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of the process of passing from one extreme to the other. She dwells on the fascination exerted over her mind by the first reading of his poetry, and tells how she "fastened on the book with a grip like steel," and carried it off and hid it under her pillow; how it affected her