reads him the more one learns the depth of thought there was in this young man of twenty-four. -There, too, is his sympathy with the Spanish peasant, his apotheosis of the heroism of woman, his burning cry for liberty and his love for all that is beautiful in nature. Beneath the thin garb of cynicism there beat the pulse for freedom, for generosity and for all heroic acts. His description of the battle-fields of Spain, of Talavera and the rest, set England wild with patriotic fervor. Thus it was that when the poem appeared it conquered the nation, thirsting and hungering for a spokesman or poet to speak according to the exigency of the time.

While the "Childe Harold" is the chief poem by which Byron is known, and the one that will give him a permanent place in English literature, it is by no means the whole of his title. All of his work has greatness to it, and whether we read the "Corsair," or the " Giaour," the " Bride of Abydos," or "Don Juan," we feel equally impressed with the superbness of the genius which can so exquisitely express the feelings of the human soul. Byron belongs to the choicest spirits of English poesy in all ages. And yet his fame has been well-nigh as fitful as his stormy life. He published the first two cantos of "Childe

Harold," and became the petted hero of the hour. The world threw itself at his feet.

For two years

his appetite was cloyed with adulation. Then came the revulsion. He married, he quarreled with his wife, in little more than a year separated from her, and from that time British virtue pursued him like Nemesis. He fled from England, his life was reported to be vicious, he espoused the cause of Greece, and, broken in health and fortune, died at the age of thirty-six. His body was refused burial in Westminster Abbey, and his fame sank more and more, until, in 1840, Carlyle could write: "Nobody reads Byron now." His own generation had exalted him to the skies. The succeeding one, for which Carlyle spoke, rudely thrust him aside as not worthy of consideration. The present generation of readers have held themselves in equipoise, not yet entirely free from the earlier influences, but still inclined to return to the devotion of their fathers.

Take him altogether I look upon him as the greatest literary power of the century.

But his personal life was far from happy, and it is so familiar that a repetition of it here is almost unnecessary. He was born in 1788, his father being a naval officer of noble birth who, having lived a profligate life, married for a second

wife Catherine Gordon, a Scotch heiress. In the family ancestry the Byrons were distinguished for recklessness and bad luck. Byron's father run through his wife's fortune, and then died, leaving the mother to bring up a son whom she, too, often designated as a "lame brat," for the poor child had a withered foot from infancy. The mother's uneven temper told upon the boy and, unhappily, as he grew older the world looked upon him as his mother had done, with fondness and coldness by turns. The result was, as we all know, that in childhood, youth and manhood he never was treated with justness. He made his triumphs through the power of genius, he sacrificed his life in a Quixotic expedition. His works remain. They may be read again and again with profit and delight by all who love literature and desire to know the full beauties of the English tongue.

SHELLEY AND HIS LETTERS.

(1792-1822.)

This

In the literature of letters Shelley's correspondence has always stood very high. Indeed some of the critics-Matthew Arnold among themhave praised them extravagantly and said that his best and most enduring work will ultimately be found in his prose, such as his letters and his unfinished "Defense of Poetry." judgment is ill considered and untenable. Fine as his prose undoubtedly is, Shelley's fame is imperishably based on such poems as "Prometheus Unbound," the "Ode to the West Wind," the "Cloud," "Adonais," "To Constantia Singing" and a dozen other lyrics and short pieces unsurpassed by anything in the language. But one can enjoy his letters and find therein a thousand beauties without having to subscribe to the opinion that they are the best of his works, or even the best letters in the language. As letters they are not equal to Walpole's or Lady Mary's, though

they may be classed with those of Cowper and of Gray. Many of them are full of poetic description, others reveal himself and others tell of his occupations.

In a letter to William Godwin written when he was twenty, after his expulsion from Oxford and while he was in rebellion against his father, he describes himself:

I am the son of a man of fortune in Sussex. The habits of thinking of my father and myself never coincided. Passive obedience was inculcated and enforced in my childhood. I was required to love, because it was my duty to love; it is scarcely necessary to remark that coercion obviated its own intention. I was haunted with a passion for the wildest and most extravagant romances, Ancient books of chemistry and magic were perused with an enthusiasm of wonder almost to belief. My sentiments were unrestrained by anything within me external impediments were numerous and strongly applied their effect was merely temporary.

:

This is the keynote to Shelley's character. What he was as a boy, a rebel against parental authority and oppression, such he was as a man —a rebel against the world's authority.

When this letter was written he had already made the unhappy marriage with Harriet Westbrook, which ended in tragedy. Nor was Godwin's influence over the impressionable poet altogether happy, though the influence of Mary