ledge the right of the challenge. If God created man in his image, man has a right (shall we not even say, a duty?) to erect himself to the fullest inch of that image, and ask questions. Does it not, at any rate, argue a certain nobility of mind (if exorbitant) in one betrayed by his fellow-creatures, that he walks straight up and has it out with the Creator himself?

That is what-in Manfred, in Cain, in Heaven and Earth, in The Vision of Judgment, in The Deformed Transformed-substantially in every line he wrote after that Spring of 1816, informs his purpose. He hates Castlereagh, and all jackals; Brougham, and all sham opponents of tyranny. He disdains its stupidity in George III, its fungoid growth in George IV, the heartless and brilliant expertise of Wellington in saving the world for the benefit of a class. He sees War for what it is, or at any rate for what he believes it to be a piratical hazard of the powerful, cruelly employing the unreasoning but agonising mass of mankind as dupes and victims. And, proud rebel that he is, he carries the question (Shelley, too, carried it) up past your George the Third, Wellington, Castlereagh, to hand it, with Lucifer's own politeness, to the Almighty in session. "Your pardon, Sire,-but, with such agents, is the judge of the Earth, just now, doing right?"

At any rate, to take hold upon Genesis and shake it, as Byron and Shelley did in an age (with difficulty conceivable by us) when even to venture a doubt that the Universe came into being in six days of twenty-four hours by the clock was to evoke every curse of the orthodox, is an act of intellectual courage, and remains that in despite of Goethe and his dictum that “the moment Byron begins to reflect, he is a child." It may be simple: but it is, or was, a thought; and to utter and

maintain it, against the England of Byron's day, required a mind very high above childishness: nay, a mind that had some measure of the Titanic: for, be the thought itself simple, the challenge is the grand challenge of Prometheus.

Many have noted that in all good portraits of Byron his head has a poise, his face a lurid look, as of one who dwelt in a region above his fellows, in a high atmosphere where tempests are more frequent, more terrific -but more frequent also and closer, clearer, more rarefied, are the vistas of Heaven. It is the face of Lucifer, star of the morning-of Lucifer, the accuser with the beautiful curled lip-equally the accuser whether at Heaven's gate claiming George III for hell, or prompting Cain to demand of God himself, concerning Adam's transgression:

What had I done in this?-I was unborn:

I sought not to be born; nor love the state

To which that birth has brought me. Why did he
Yield to the Serpent and the woman? or

Yielding-why suffer?

What was there in this?

The tree was planted, and why not for him?
If not, why place him near it, where it grew
The fairest in the centre? They have but
One answer to all questions. ""Twas his will,
And he is good." How know I that? Because
He is all-powerful, must all-good, too, follow?

But (to leave theology alone and deal only with Byron's attitude towards earthly despots) I will ask you to consider this one point upon which some thought will be usefully expended, whether you apply it to the Europe of today, again staggering-blinded, almost broken-out of a stupendous war upon human liberty,

or prefer to narrow it backwards down and upon an academic theme, "The Romantic Revival in English Poetry." If, and while, you so narrow it, I yet beg you to reflect that, of its pioneers, Coleridge tottered through opium to Highgate; Wordsworth, after a few glorious years, settled to live comfortably beside the cataracts of the Lake Country that had haunted him like a passion-and ended with Ecclesiastical Sonnets and Sonnets in Defence of Capital Punishment; Southey, the Pantisocrat, turned renegade and kept in long domesticity his home fires burning with duplicate proofs of articles betraying his old faith. But, of the ensuing rank of rebels, the great ones-Shelley, Keats, Landor, Byron-for various reasons found England no place for them, departed into exile, and in exile died. Let us weigh their names today against those of Frere, Castlereagh, Gifford, Lockhart, ask which were-after all and on the whole in the right, and beware how we persecute for opinion.

We have only to read a list of the poems poured forth in those first months of passionate exile and we stand amazed before an energy which seems almost maniacal. We examine them, and are amazed yet more by their poetical strength. Chillon, the Stanzas to Augusta, The Dream, the awful poem on Darkness with its most awful conclusion-but suffer me while I read it:

And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again:-a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no Love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was Death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails-men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress-he died.
The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heaped a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they raked up,

And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects-saw, and shrieked, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The World was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless-

A lump of death-a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirred within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropped

They slept on the abyss without a surge

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perished; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them-She was the Universe.

Such things as that-with Manfred, Mazeppa, Beppo, The Lament of Tasso, The Prophecy of Dante-come not of determination of words to the pen, but are creations, heaved out from the volcanic breast of this man.

VIII

It happened as such things do happen-that this soul, turned inward upon itself and, having found itself, preoccupied with expressing itself-that Byron, alone, or having only the Alps and Shelley, most etherial of men, for his spiritual companions-blundered, in Manfred and Cain, over the edge of that actual and fatal ground on which all the serpents of scandal were hissing lies about him—and about Shelley, with The Revolt of Islam and some utterly false deductions for all their excuse. "The time Byron and Shelley spent together" -I quote here from Dr. George Brandes

profitable and enjoyable as it was, would have been happier but for the behaviour of some of their fellow-countrymen whose curiosity led them to dog the footsteps and spy the actions of the two poets. English tourists had the incredible impertinence to force their way into Byron's house. When a stop was put to this, they stood with telescopes on the shore or on the road; they looked over the garden-wall; and hotel-waiters were bribed, as the Venetian gondoliers afterwards were, to communicate all that went on.

Hired spies never fail with a story: it is the goods they are paid to deliver. Rumours, all false, spiced and garnished up to meet the market of scandal, were duly indited in the letters of these tourists and posted to England-"gossip" by degrees making the poets out to be incarnate devils.