world; he was at the next passionately and sincerely revealing his inmost suffering to the whole world, and declaiming against the injustice with which he was treated. He was a sensitive, im‐ pulsive, emotional child throughout his whole life, a person who to a lesser degree than most men learned the maxim inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi —

γνώθι σεαυτον

George Gordon Byron was born January 22, 1788, in London. The Byron family was of Norman stock (the Buruns, recorded in the Domesday Book), and the Gordons, his mother's family, were descended from James I of Scotland. Byron's father, Captain John Byron, of the Horse Guards, was a practiced libertine. He first abducted the Marchioness of Carmarthen, whom he married after she had obtained her divorce, and soon after her death in 1784 married Catherine Gordon, supposed to be a great heiress. He squandered what fortune she had, deserted her, and, in 1791, died in France, leaving his wife and three-year-old boy to live on one hundred and fifty pounds a year. Catherine Gordon was a woman of shallow discernment, quick temper, inordinate vanity, and little sense. She alternately caressed and abused her son, at times falling into paroxysms of rage during which she pursued the child around the rooms trying to strike him with a poker. A more unpleasant picture of family life can scarcely be imagined than that which encircled Byron. He could conceive no respect for his father or affection for his mother. These influences, which during the most impressionable years of life moulded his character, must be held to excuse some of the faults that were only too notorious in later years. His education was irregular. His natural sensitiveness was accentuated by a slight physical deformity, resembling club-foot, and his home surroundings made him rebellious and uncontrollable. At the age of ten he inherited from his great-uncle, the “wicked old lord,” the Newstead estate and his title, and his nobility made him more intractable than ever. He was precocious in his affections, falling violently and apparently sincerely in love, first with Mary Duff in 1797, then with Margaret Parker (perhaps the "Thyrza" of his poems) in 1800, and again with Mary Anne Chaworth in 1803. After some desultory study under private masters and at Harrow, he went up, in 1805, to Trinity College, Cambridge. There his worst characteristics were displayed, his pride, conceit, ostentation, and above all his delight in shocking the conventional authorities by his unconventional conduct. He left the University in 1808 without taking a degree.

Even while he was at college he had taken his first initiation into poetry. During 1806 and 1807 he wrote, printed, and published a volume of poems, Hours of Idleness, which attracted indulgent attention from many of the reviews. The Edinburgh Review, however, criticized the poems harshly, so Byron took striking revenge in his famous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published March 1, 1809. Many of his charges were unjust and were so acknowledged later by Byron, but his satire attracted much notice and gained him a place in the literary world.

In April of 1808 he entered upon his inheritance with revels at Newstead; in March of 1809 he took his seat in the House of Lords, but, acutely sensitive as always, did not deem his reception sufficiently cordial; and early in July of the same year, with his devoted friend Hobhouse, he set out upon his continental travels.

He spent about two years abroad, mainly in the countries about the Mediterranean, especially Spain, Greece, Albania, Turkey, and Asia Minor. In later years many myths grew up around these travels, and Byron was reputed to be the hero of his own poetical romances. He returned to London in July of 1811, much embarrassed by debts, with a satire entitled Hints from Horace, a number of minor poems as To Florence, ‘The spell is broke, the charm is flown' Maid of Athens and two cantos of Childe Harold. Murray, the publisher, accepted the lastnamed and issued it early in 1812.

Byron's remark, that he "awoke and found himself famous," expresses the result of this publication. The poem went through five editions in the year. Byron became the social favorite in London; the titled poet was courted everywhere. Susceptible women especially succumbed

to him, and his life was for a time a succession of more or less disgraceful intrigues. For a time he had an "affair" with Lady Caroline Lamb, wife of Lord Melbourne, from which he had the utmost difficulty in extricating himself. The flighty woman threw herself in his way at every opportunity and later involved him in her own disgrace. An intrigue with Lady Oxford followed, and another with Lady Frances Webster. He was a welcome guest at all the houses of the great - Holland House, Lady Melbourne's, - he was a member of a dozen fashionable clubs, he numbered among his friends Moore, Rogers, and Campbell.

He was acute enough to take advantage in a literary way of his popularity. During thes years he wrote with feverish haste a number of his narrative poems - The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos in 1813, The Corsair and Lara the next year, Parisina and The Siege of Corinth, written then but not published until 1816. Scott's contemporary verse romances were completely eclipsed. Of The Corsair, fourteen thousand copies were sold in one day.

In January, 1815, Byron married Miss Anne Isabella Milbanke, an heiress, and entitled in her own right to a peerage. How much Byron was influenced by his love for her and how much by his desire for her fortune will always remain a mooted question. It is noteworthy, however, that in after years Byron never spoke of her save with respect and affection. A few days over a year after the marriage, and five weeks after the birth of a daughter, Augusta Ada, Lady Byron left London, went to her father's house, and shortly afterward instituted proceedings for a legal separation. The true reasons for this separation will never be known. The monstrous charges made by Lady Byron in her old age are unproven and unprovable. It is probable that sufficient reasons are to be found in the mutual incompatability between the erratic, emotional poet, and the conventional, perhaps somewhat prudish, wife.

The marriage and quick separation were the talk of London. Byron, from feelings of delicacy we should like to think, refused to shield himself by casting any blame upon his wife. His poems, Fare Thee Well, and The Sketch, purporting to represent his feelings at the time, were privately circulated and, in April, printed in a newspaper. Gradually public opinion turned against him. By the time the separation papers were signed, April 18, Byron was socially ostracized, and a week later he left England for the Continent with apparently the bitterest of feelings at the injustice with which he had been treated. In the short space of four years he had turned the full circle, from obscurity to renown, and from renown back to ostracism.

Byron's best poetical work lay before him. He traveled by way of the Rhine to Geneva where he joined the Shelleys and, during his intimacy with them, wrote some of his finest poetry. The third canto of Childe Harold, Prometheus, The Prisoner of Chillon, two acts of Manfred, the Stanzas to Augusta (his beloved half-sister), and the Epistle to Augusta, were all composed there. It is a curious example of the volatile nature of the man that, fresh from his London disgrace, he contracted an intimacy with Jane Clairmont from which in December was born a natural daughter, Allegra.

Late in 1816 he left the Shelleys and went over the Alps to Italy, accompanied at first by his friend Hobhouse. He finally settled in Venice and there plunged into the lowest and most degrading dissipations. He seems to have taken a degenerate joy in writing accounts of these revels and intrigues to London, knowing, perhaps, that, spread along the electric wires of social gossip, they would scandalize London. He was to some extent redeemed from his miscellaneous debauchery by his liaison, beginning about 1819, with the young, beautiful, and accomplished Countess Guiccioli, who as his mistress for the next four years gave him all the love and care that could have been given by a devoted wife. From the end of 1819, indeed, the relations between Byron and the Countess were established on a recognized Italian basis, Byron being her cavalier servente. Even through these years of intrigue and dissipation, however, his splendid mind was busy, and his literary production great. He finished Manfred, wrote the Lament of Tasso, Beppo (1818), Mazeppa and two cantos of Don Juan (1819), three cantos of Don Juan, Marino Falieri, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain in 1821, The Vision of Judgment and Werner in 1822, the lyrical drama Heaven and Earth, Morgante Maggiore, and The Island in 1823, and The Deformed Transformed in 1824.

During his stay in Italy he had interested himself in the struggle of the Italians for freedom from the Austrian rule, had indeed mixed with the Carbonari and been made a chief of their fighting troops, and as a result had fallen under the suspicion of the Austrian police. In 1823 the brave struggle of the Greeks in the Morea for independence from Turkey attracted him and he gave money unstintedly to their cause. Early in 1824 he went to Greece and identified himself | with the revolutionists, being received with honor by Mavrocordatos, the Greek chieftain, and made a commander-in-chief of a guard of Suliote troops.

This last exploit of Byron's life has done much to rehabilitate his character in the eyes of the world. However much he may have dreamed of spectacular glory, it is certain that during his few months in Greece he actually suffered much for the cause, and was of service in reconciling opposing factions. His actual life there was brief. He had hoped to lead troops in battle, but was not destined to do so. On April 11 he was seized with fever and on the 19th he died, amid the lamentations of all Greece. His body was carried to England, and, the Dean of Westminster refusing burial in the Abbey, was buried in the family vault of Hucknall-Torkard Church, near Newstead.

Byron was an unusually handsome and striking figure. Trelawny thus describes him: “He was . . . of middle height, five feet eight and a half inches; regular features, without a stain er furrow on his pallid skin, his shoulders broad, chest open, body and limbs finely proportioned. His small, highly finished head and curly hair had an airy and graceful appearance from the massiveness and length of his throat: you saw his genius in his eyes and lips. In short, nature could do little more than she had done for him, both in outward form and in the inward spirit she had given to animate it." And joined with these graces of person was a rare gift of personal magnetism. His sprightliness in conversation, his keen wit, his intuitional insight endeared him to those who came into intimate contact with him. His faults were notorious, in his lifetime, but time has done much to erase these from his memory. After his death his many notable charities, his high chivalry toward his wife during the trying period following her desertion of him when a word from him might have turned London society in his favor, his sincere devotion to the principle of freedom witnessed by his willingness to lay down his life for it, all combined to raise his fame in his own land and abroad. His life is a mass of irreconcilable contradictions: we cannot attempt to explain it, but we can, from this distance, forgive much that the conventional world of his own time could not forgive.

During the century that has followed his death many have attempted seriously to deny the reality of his poetic inspiration, but the verdict of posterity is being cast in his favor. Goethe once summed up Byron as follows: "Lord Byron is to be regarded as a man, as an Englishman, and as a great talent. His good qualities belong chiefly to the man, his bad to the Englishman and the peer, his talent is incommensurable." Matthew Arnold, keenest of our English critics, wrote that "these two, Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and preeminent in actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century."

The first characteristic of his poetry is its energy. None can read Byron to the end without standing amazed before the impelling sweep of his thought, the facility and force of his expres sion, and the vitality that breathes through his lines. Granted that he was many times a poseur, granted that his egotism, vanity, and misanthropy intrude themselves often in his poems; yet we must acknowledge an intellectual grasp and vision, a sincerity in his hatred of hypocrisy and cant, an imaginative conception granted to but few poets in the history of the world. He spread before us his inmost thoughts and emotions with an intimacy which not even Mrs. Browning has surpassed, and we who read to-day are willing to recognize, through the contradictions, faults, and vanities, the innate genius of the man.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Of poets of revolt, of the "Satanic school" as Southey said, none was more delicate, ethereal, and divinely inspired than Shelley. Because of his fiery independence of spirit he revolted against the bonds of custom and convention and gained for himself among his contemporaries an undeserved reputation for gross immorality, but with the passage of a century, the innate purity of his life and motives has been recognized. Historical perspective has thrown into their proper relations many of the incidents once magnified beyond all reason.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792, at an old-fashioned country house called Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex. His father, Timothy Shelley, was the son and heir of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart, and was Member of Parliament for the constituency of Shoreham. His mother, Elizabeth Pilfold, was of a good Surrey family, and was herself beautiful and capable, but not notably literary.

As a child Shelley was sensitive, impetuous, and highly imaginative. His brothers and sisters, all younger than he, have recorded for us incidents peculiarly valuable in revealing his imaginative and romantic nature, as his description of the nearby wood inhabited by a dragon and a headless specter, of the huge turtle in the pond, of the wise old snake in the garden, of the alchemist in the garret. After primary education at schools in the neighborhood, he went to Eton at twelve, where he gained the sobriquets of "Mad Shelley" and "Shelley the atheist," and was not popular either with masters or with his schoolmates. He left Eton at eighteen and entered University College, Oxford.

Shelley had already shown his decided bent toward literature. In his childhood he had scribbled verses with ease, and while he was still in Eton he published two wild prose romances, Zastrossi and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, reflections of the Mrs. Radcliffe school. At the time of his matriculation at Oxford he had poems in the hands of publishers. He showed thus early the impetuous hurry which characterized him through life, the tendency to ignore solid facts and logic in the sweep of his impulses and his imagination, to rush into print with his immature work and half-formed theories.

Shelley's stay at the University was very brief. With a friend, Hogg, as his confidant, he printed anonymously a little pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, an argument that neither reason nor testimony adequately establishes the existence of a deity, and sent it broadcast to invite discussion. The authorities at the College traced the authorship to him, and expelled him and his friend March 25, 1811.

Shelley went to London. He found himself in desperate straits. His father, scandalized at his action, demanded that he return home, study, apologize to the Oxford authorities, and profess conformity to the Church. His allowances were cut off and he lived for a time on contributions from his sisters, secretly conveyed to him by a mutual friend, Miss Harriet Westbrook. Shelley refused to recant, and not until six weeks later was a reconciliation effected on the basis that Shelley should receive two hundred pounds a year and complete independence of action and thought. The acquiescence of the rather stubborn conventional father to these terms was due to the fact that Shelley was in direct line for the baronetcy, and was, therefore, a person of considerable importance.

Shelley's impetuous nature was shortly to involve him in more serious difficulties. The pretty intermediary during his six weeks in London, Harriet Westbrook, had fallen entirely under Shelley's proselyting influence, professed atheism, and rebelled against a return to school. She threw herself upon Shelley's protection, and he, really inspired by the purest and highest motives, eloped with her and married her in Edinburgh August 28, 1811. His conduct was highly honorable from every point of view, but the two were singularly ill-mated. His wife was beautiful, sweet-tempered, and well-bred, albeit she was the daughter of an innkeeper, but was wholly unable to "feel poetry and understand philosophy." These failings, not serious in the wife of an ordinary man, were fatal for the happiness of Shelley.

The marriage bond held Shelley for about three years, but the continual bickering that arose between his wife and him proved intolerable at last. It must be remembered, in order to understand rightly the succeeding events, that Shelley's pronounced principles were wholly out of accord with the rules of society and the laws of his country. Marriage was to him merely a convention, not to be held sacred or inviolable. When he met a woman who could more intimately enter into a spiritual communion with him than could his wife, he held that, except for arbitrary conventions of society, he was free to accept such communion. In his mind he was violating no sacred law. Such a woman he met in Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She was imbued as he was with atheistic principles and contempt for social convention. July 28, 1814, Shelley and she and Jane Clairmont, a half-sister, left the Godwin house, crossed to Calais, and went to Switzerland, all three prepared to ignore social conventions and accept the conse quences. In January of 1815, upon the death of Sir Bysshe Shelley, the poet, as the prospective heir to his father, came immediately into possession of a good income.

In November of 1816, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine. Shelley had remained on good terms with her and had given her a liberal allowance for her needs, but she herself had formed a connection with some other man and had also become intemperate. Disappointment, disgrace, remorse, some ill-treatment at home, and an hereditary predisposition toward suicide combined to drive her to this fatal step. Shelley, though deeply shocked and grieved, never held himself in any way responsible. In December of 1816, all obstacles to the legal union of Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin being removed by Harriet's death, the marriage was performed.

Shelley now settled in Buckinghamshire and undertook to recover his children from the Westbrooks, but his right to do so was contested in the Chancery Court on the ground that Shelley had deserted his wife and would educate his children in his own atheistic and anti-social opinions. Judgment was given against Shelley, and the children were put under the guardianship of Dr. Hume, an orthodox army surgeon nominated by Shelley, the poet contributing liberally to their support.

In March, 1818, Shelley, frightened by what he believed to be serious lung trouble, moved his whole household to Italy, where he spent the remainder of his life. He migrated from place to place, Milan, Leghorn, Venice, Rome, Naples, Florence, Pisa, - and in 1822 was living on the Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia. Much of the time there Shelley spent sailing in the little skiff, Don Juan, with his friend Williams. Early in July they set out across the gulf to meet Leigh Hunt at Leghorn. On the 8th they left Leghorn for the return trip. Days passed and nothing was heard of them. Trelawney, who had watched them sail out of Leghorn Harbor, rode in person along the shore toward Via Reggio searching for evidences of a wreck. At that place he found a water-keg and some bottles which had been in the boat. On the 18th, Shelley's body was cast up on the sand, "with the volume of Eschylus in one pocket, and Keats's poems in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away.” On the 6th of August, the body was taken from the sand which had covered it and cremated on the spot in compliance with the requirements of the law. "The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy," writes Trelawney; "the fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to gray ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw and skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt." His ashes were carried to Rome and buried there in the little Protestant cemetery with the following inscription:

"Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium, Natus iv. Aug. м.CCXII. Obiit viii Jul. MDCCCXXII.

During his short and very eventful life as outlined above, Shelley had established himself as the greatest lyric poet who has written in English. Queen Mab was published when he was