him as little as its popular belief. Unbelievers of the class of Hume and Gibbon did not suffer on account of being without faith; their turn of mind was Epicurean; the world of sense and intelligence furnished them with as much of enjoyment as they required, and they had no quarrel with the social order which secured to them the tranquil possession of their daily pleasures. But Byron had a mind of that daring and impetuous temper which, while it rushes into the path of doubt suggested by cooler heads, presently recoils from the consequences of its own act, and shudders at the moral desolation which scepticism spreads over its life. He proclaimed to the world his misery and despair; and everywhere his words seemed to touch a sympathetic chord throughout the cultivated society of Europe. In Childe Harold-a poem of reflection and sentiment, of which the first two cantos were published in 1812—and also in the dramas of Manfred and Cain, the peculiar characteristics of Byron's genius are most forcibly represented.

In these poems, and also in those mentioned on a former page1-besides the splendour of the diction, the beauty of the versification, the richness of the unaccustomed imagery, and in some cases the interest of the narrative,—a personal element mingled, which must be noticed as having much to do with the hold they obtained upon readers of all nations. Byron was generally supposed to be

himself the great sublime he drew.

In Conrad, or in Hugo, or in Lara the reader thought he could trace the unconquerable pride, the romantic gloom, nay even some portion of the exterior semblance, of the man whom, in spite of protestations, all the world believed to have drawn his own portrait in Childe Harold. The turbulent, haughty, passionate, imperial soul of

1 See p. 343.

Byron seemed to breathe forth from the page; and this was, and still is, the secret of its charm.

The Hours of Idleness, his first work, written in 1807 when he was but nineteen, are poems truly juvenile, and show little promise of the power and versatility to which his mind afterwards attained. The satire of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, already referred to, was written in 1809. All the leading poets of the day came under the lash; but to all, except Southey, he subsequently made the amende honorable in some way or other. With the laureate he was never on good terms; and their mutual dislike broke out at various times into furious discord. Byron could not forgive in Southey, whose opinions in youth had been so wild and Jacobinical, the intolerant toryism of his manhood. Southey's feelings towards Byron seem to have been a mixture of dread, dislike, and disapproval. In the preface to the Vision of Judgment, a poem on the death of George III., Southey spoke with great severity of the 'Satanic school' of authors, and their leading spirit, alluding to Byron's Don Juan, which had recently appeared anonymously. This led to a fierce literary warfare, conducted in the columns of newspapers and in other modes, which Byron would have cut short by a challenge, but his friends dissuaded him from sending it. It is little creditable to Southey that the most acrimonious and insulting of all his letters appeared in the Courier a few months after Byron had died in Missolonghi, a martyr to the cause of the liberty of Greece.

The Prisoner of Chillon, a soliloquy placed in the mouth of Bonnivard, whom, for his championship of the rights and liberty of Geneva, the Duke of Savoy imprisoned for six years (1530–36) in the castle of Chillon on the lake of Geneva, appeared in 1816. The tale of Mazeppa, a Cossack chief distinguished in the wars of Charles XII., and Beppo, belong to the year 1818. Assailed and censured on every side, when his wife, who had gone on a visit to her father's house, expressed her intention

of not returning to him, Byron left England in 1816, and saw his native land no more. How he lived in Italy it is painful to think; so bright and powerful a spirit, degraded by the indulgence of pride and passion to a state of such deep moral defilement! Don Juan appeared, by two or three cantos at a time, between the years 1819 and 1824. It was meant, Byron tells us, 'to be a little quietly facetious upon everything.' The readiness, fulness, and variety of Byron's mind are placed by this work in the clearest light; nor less the unbounded audacity of his temper, and his contempt for all ordinary restraints. The metre is the same as the ottava rima of the Italian poets. Byron died in 1824.

There is no English poet of whom it is more difficult to express an opinion in a few words than of Crabbe. His poems often raise our admiration; but they also much too frequently provoke our derision. For though the powers of his mind were very considerable, yet they were attended with a kind of æsthetic blindness, a want of discernment, a deficient sense of what was fit to be said and what was not; thus he was often led to mix up in the strangest manner what was vulgar and trivial with what was dignified and serious. He was a man of a robust intelligence, but bereft, at least in his ordinary moods, of the finer and more delicate intuitions. The inequality thence arising appears, I think, in all his poems, except 'Sir Eustace Grey.'

His early publications The Library, The Village, and The Newspaper, all in heroic verse, date from the eighteenth century. The Village was read and revised in the year 1783 by the venerable Samuel Johnson, then in his seventy-fourth year, and owes to him the finest lines that it contains. The collection of poems published in

1 Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,
Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song?
From truth and nature shall we widely stray,

Where Virgil, not where fancy, leads the way?

6

6

1807 contained The Parish Register,' 'The Hall of Justice,' and Sir Eustace Grey.' The first of these is in three parts, which treat of baptisms, marriages, and burials respectively. Sir Eustace Grey,' a poem written in stanzas of short lines, is the story, told by himself, of an inmate of a madhouse, whom cruel injuries and the passions of an unbridled youth had bereft of reason, but whom religious meditation and faith have partially restored.

The Borough (1809), a heroic poem in a series of letters, unveils the modes of life of an English seaside town. This must certainly have been the poem which suggested the parody on Crabbe in the Rejected Addresses. The author's ridiculous anxiety to avoid giving any offence to any one is scarcely exaggerated in the parody, which makes him say, 'My profession has taught me carefully to avoid causing any annoyance, however trivial, to any individual, however foolish or wicked.' The sudden drops into the region of bathos are quite startling, and have a most comic effect. For <example :

Nor angler we on our wide stream descry,

But one poor dredger, where his oysters lie:
He, cold and wet, and driving with the tide,
Beats his weak arms against his tarry side,
Then drains the remnant of diluted gin,

To aid the warmth that languishes within.

Such imbecilities are the more provoking, because they alternate with really fine descriptive passages, such as that on the sea and strand which may be found in the same letter. A set of Tales, twenty-one in number, treating to a great extent of subjects similar to those handled in the Borough, appeared in 1812. The Tales of the Hall (1819) have more of a regular plan than any other of the author's works. Two brothers, meeting late in life at the hall of their native village, which has been purchased by the elder brother, relate to each other

passages of their past experience. These tales are composed in a more equable strain of language and thought than the Borough. They never rise very high certainly; they are prosaic and commonplace in the flow of narrative; the moralising is often threadbare: but they keep clear of the ridiculous lapses which have been noticed in the former work. The character-painting is the best thing about them, being sometimes very close and minute, and evincing much subtilty of appreciation.

1

Coleridge, the noticeable man with large grey eyes,' whose equal in original power of genius has rarely appeared amongst men, published his first volume of poems in 1796. His project of a Pantisocratic community, to be founded in America, has been already noticed. Visionary as it was, he received Southey's announcement of his withdrawal from the scheme with a tempest of indignation. For some years after his marriage with the sister of Southey's wife, he supported himself by writing for the newspapers and other literary work. Feeble health, and an excessive nervous sensibility, led him, about the year 1799, to commence the practice of taking opium, and he was enslaved to this miserable habit for twelve or fourteen years. Its paralysing effects on the mind and character none better knew, or has more accurately described, than himself. What impression he produced at this period upon others may be gathered from a passage in one of Southey's letters, written in 1804. Coleridge,' he says, 'is worse in body than you seem to believe; but the main cause is the management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's dance-eternal activity without action. At times, he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any exertion. I will begin to-morrow, he says, and thus he has been all his life long

1 Wordsworth.

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