low images, with no life or heart in them. Turn to Shakspeare's creations, even those most removed from common life, or follow Spenser into the shadowy regions of Fairy Land, or Milton into his supernatural spaces, and so faithful are their creations to a deep science of humanity, that every human heart recognises the truth of them: they live and have a reality by virtue of their poetic truthfulness. But of Byron's heroes or of his heroines, which is a natural, truthful character, such as great poets give for the admiration or for the admonition of their fellow-beings? No pure and lofty idea of womanhood appeared in his female personages; he scarce lifts them above the sensual softness of oriental degradation, investing it in a delusive light of false and fanciful sentiment. His male personages (they are not truthful enough to be called characters) are strangely alike in their unreality. "But" (as has been justly remarked by the sagacious author of Philip Van Artavelde*) "there is yet a worse defect in them. Lord Byron's conception of a hero, is an evidence not only of scanty materials of knowledge from which to construct the ideal of a human being, but also of a want of perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and essentially, therefore, weak of mind. Strip them of the veil of mystery and the trappings of poetry, resolve them into their plain realities, and they are such beings as, in the eyes of a reader of masculine judgment, would certainly excite no sentiment of admiration, even if they did not provoke contempt. When the conduct and feelings attributed to them are reduced into prose, and brought to

* Preface to Philip Van Artavelde, p. xv.

the test of a rational consideration, they must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no strength, except that of their intensely selfish passions; in whom all is vanity; their exertions being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and their sufferings for vanity under the name of pride. If such beings as these are to be regarded as heroical, where in human nature are we to look for what is low in sentiment or infirm in character?"

How nobly opposite to Lord Byron's ideal was that conception of an heroical character which took life and immortality from the hand of Shakspeare:

"Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core; ay, in my heart of heart."

It was, however, with these fictions, that the popular fancy was fascinated, not only because the poet's genius gave a charm to them, but because that which addresses itself to what is false and morbid in man or woman will find a response, happily only for a time. In like manner, there was an attraction in the unreserved disclosures which the poet was all the while making of his own feelings and passions, taking the large concourse of his listeners into his confidence; and running through those feelings there was the poison of moral disease. On the pages of Byron you can scarce escape from some form or other of morbid feeling, a vicious egotism, pride, contempt, misanthropy: these are attributes not of strength, but of weakness; and knowing, as we now do, the story of his career, is it not pitiful that one so gifted should have gone whining through life, complaining of man, and rebellious of God, and all the while self-indulgent alike in sensual and sentimental voluptuousness? It is well said, that if life be

ever so unfortunate, a man's folding his hands over it in melancholy mood, and suffering himself to be made a puppet by it, is a sadly weak proceeding. Most thoughtful men have probably some dark fountains in their souls, by the side of which, if there were time, and it were decorous, they could let their thoughts sit down and wail indefinitely. That long Byron wail fascinated men for a time, because there is that in human nature."* Herein was the mischief that Byron's poetry did in its season of authority: reversing the poet's function, which is to heal what is unhealthy, to strengthen what is weak, to chasten what is corrupt, and to lift up what is sinking down: he fostered what was false, ministered to what was morbid, and, moreover, tempted them on to the willing delusion that their weakness was strength. Thus unreal and false habits of feeling were engendered, and men and women, under this delusion, grew sentimental and fantastic, and flattered themselves that there was beauty in the ugliness of pride, that there was magnanimity in the littleness of contempt, and depth of passion in the shallowness of discontent, and majesty in unmanly moodiness and misanthropy. Now all this, which came from the Byron teaching, was false both in morals and in poetry; for in this mortal life crowded with its realities for every hour of every human being's existence, all fantastic and self-occupied sadness is a folly and a sin―unmanly in man, unpoetic in the poet, well rebuked by a woman-poet's strenuous words:

"We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination, given us to bring down

The choirs of singing angels, overshone
By God's clear glory,-down our earth to rake

*Friends in Council, p. 198.

The dismal snows instead; flake following flake
To cover all the corn. We walk upon

The shadow of hills across a level thrown,
And pant like climbers. Near the alder-brake
We sigh so loud, the nightingale within
Refuses to sing loud, as else she would.

O brothers! let us leave the shame and sin

Of taking vainly, in a plaintive mood,

The holy name of Grief!-holy herein,

That by the grief of One, came all our good."*

I know of nothing that more betrays the moral weakness of Byron, than that he gave so much of his power to spread the contagion of a morbid melancholy, the selfish, thankless, faithless weariness of life, which another womanpoet has justly called a blasphemy:

"Blaspheme not thou thy sacred life, nor turn

O'er joys that God hath for a season lent
Perchance to try thy spirit, and its bent,
Effeminate soul and base, weakly to mourn.
There lies no desert in the land of life,
For e'en that tract that barrenest doth seem,
Laboured of thee in faith and hope, shall teem
With heavenly harvests and rich gatherings, rife.
Haply no more, music and mirth and love,
And glorious things of old and younger art,
Shall of thy days make one perpetual feast:
But when these bright companions all depart,
Lay there thy head upon the ample breast

Of Hope, and thou shalt hear the angels sing above."†

In Lord Byron's portraiture of human character, his genius was prostituted to a worse abuse, in that it confounds and sophisticates the simplicity of consciencebreaks down the barriers between right and wrong, by abating the natural abhorrence of crime, and arraying the

* Sonnet on Exaggeration. Mrs. Browning's Poems, vol. i. p. 344. Poems by Frances Anne Kemble, p. 150.

guilt of even the vilest vice in a false splendour and pride. How different from Shakspeare's genuine morality, so loyal to the best moral instincts, never making vice attractive, not tempting us even to look fondly on the proud and sinful temper until it be chastened by adversity, still less holding up for admiration the moral monsters in whom one virtue is linked with a thousand crimes!

Let me next hasten to notice something of the character of the poetry of Byron, considered as a poet of nature: I mean, of the material world. In the last lecture I had occasion to remark, that it seemed to me a happy circumstance that the great results in physical science did not take place during the low state of religious belief that existed in the last century, but were reserved for a better period of opinion, which could make those results subservient to the cause of truth, instead of being perverted to the uses of materialism. I would now add that, while in our times there has been such active scientific study of nature, happily the poetic culture of nature has been no less earnest, and thus a deeper knowledge of the marvels and the glory of the universe has been promoted both by the processes of analysis and observation, and by the processes of the imagination. Let us see how Byron contributed to this, and what he has done to help his fellowmen to the poetic visions of nature. No poet ever enjoyed larger or more various opportunities of communing with earth and the elements. He was familiar with ocean and lake, with Alpine regions, and with Grecian and Italian lands and skies. He had a quick susceptibility to all that is grand and beautiful in the world of sense, as he wandered over the earth.