stammer of his censors was unnoted in a tempest of applause; his vices were lost in the lustre of his fame, and his morbid passions secured a morbid sympathy. The fervor which his poetry then inspired, compelled multitudes to think lightly of his sins; now, that multitudes, in their coldness, revert to his transgressions, the reaction seems to turn against his poetry. Both the moral and the critical antithesis, in each case, has an element of error. I shall try to give my own convictions with simplicity. I have arrived at them through no unfriendly prepossessions; and if my tendency would lead me in any degree from strictness, it would be much to extenuate, but naught set down in malice.

For order, though not for information, it will be needful to trace a rapid outline of the life, which forms a text for the reflections that follow.

BYRON was born in London in 1788, and with some faint prospect of a peerage. His father's profligacy had left him but small means of a gentlemanly competence. His childhood was spent in the north of Scotland, where his wayward mother supported herself and him in economical decency. Opportunely for Byron, the heir who stood between him and fortune died, and a coronet fell upon his boyish head. Byron was not insensible to the distinction. The morning after his recognition as a lord, when his name in the class re

ceived the addition of "dominus," unable to reply "adsum," he burst into tears. Even in boyhood, Byron never forgot his rank, and there were occasions when he did not remember it with the kindest grace. His reply to his teacher, Dr. Butler, in refusing, out of pique, his invitation to dinner, is an instance of haughty discourtesy. His refusal and reason are equal in rudeness. He coolly rejected the request; and when it was inquired why? "Because, Dr. Butler, if you should happen to come into my neighborhood, when I was staying at Newstead, I certainly should not ask you to dine with me, and therefore I feel that I ought not to dine with you." Nor is this aristocratic temper, less apparent in other youthful moods, or more gracious. Addressing lines to a humble favorite of his own age, he shows the consciousness of their respective ranks in the opening words:

"Let folly smile to view the names

Of thee and me in friendship joined."

Thus marking a distinction which a boy of spontaneous and simple character would scarcely have thought about, and to whom it would have presented no occasion for the smiles of folly or of wisdom.

Later in life Byron would know that there was no real friendship in this juvenile companionship. Such

condescension and concession, with such direct announcement of condescension and concession, have no accordance with genuine friendship. Friendship, like love, is self-forgetful. The only inequality it knows is one that exalts the object, and humbles self. The object is so thoroughly precious, so enriched to the imagination, and so endeared to the heart, that, in its supreme worth, all else is forgotten, and all else is lost. It may be doubted whether Byron, throughout his life, ever had for any of his own sex such friendship, or for any of the other ever had such love. One friend he confesses to have had, but that one was not of the human family. This friend was his dog Boatswain, to whose remains he gave a monument.

"To mark a friend's remains, these stones arise;

I never knew but one, and here he lies."

If this is a poetical exaggeration, the cynicism of impassioned youth, the confession of his maturity in sober prose, does not fall far short of it. As to friendship, he says "it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited. I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel any thing that deserves the name; all my others are men-of-the-world friendships. I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired and esteemed

him; so that not even vanity could bribe me into it; for of all men, Shelley thought highest of my talents, and perhaps of my disposition."

The school-boy days of Byron were lonely and unprotected. Without guardianship or control, he was thrown upon his own impulses; and if these impulses were brave and generous, they were also wild and reckless. A melancholy reflection is that, with which he refers to the commencement of his college life. "From that moment," he says, "I began to grow old in my own esteem, and in my esteem age is not estimable. I took my gradation in the vices with great promptitude; but they were not to my taste, for my early passions, though violent in the extreme, were concentrative, and hated division and spreading abroad. I could have left or lost the whole world with or for that which I loved; but, though my temperament was naturally burning, I could not share in the commonplace libertinism of the place and time without disgust. And yet this very disgust, and my heart thrown back upon itself, threw me into excesses perhaps more fatal than those from which I shrank."

Byron came forth from college with no lofty scholarship, but with a world of undeveloped genius. He then commenced his manhood's life in literary combat and pecuniary embarrassment. His volume of "Juvenile

Sentimentalism" was baptized by the Edinburgh Review in those waters of bitterness, which were never intended for the literary salvation of the bantlings on which they were poured. If the feeble offspring shivered under the ablution, the youthful father did not share its weakness. In plain words, he chastised his chastisers; but the strokes which they gave "with whips, he returned with scorpions." To the battle of criticism, he joined the perplexities of excess. Byron's fortune, small at any time for his station, was nothing for his desires. Newstead beheld a new order of brotherhood, in which sensual orgies took the place of spiritual vespers; in which bacchanalian chants answered to religious psalmody; in which young rakes, garmented as old monks, crowned the mysteries of debauch by quaffing Burgundy from a human skull. The soul which seeks all its revenue of pleasure from the senses, quickly leaves them bankrupt; and senses taxed as Byron taxed them, were not long in reaching pauperism. Satiated and disgusted, he then turned to travel for change of scene and change of passion. In the sunny lands of Spain and Greece he found wherewith to feed his restless cravings, to meet his longings for intense emotion, and to gratify his wishes for the wild and the beautiful. Greece especially, with its fair skies, its ideal past, and its broken present; its majesty in frag