vides him with an act: love in the first together and we laugh to see the brute, place. Certainly Certainly Donna Julia is very at the bottom. who is lying Here is lovable, and Lyron loves her ; but she our friend Juan reading Julia's last

letter, and swearing in a transport never
to forget the beautiful eyes which he
caused to weep so much. Was ever
feeling more tender or sincere? But
unfortunately Juan is at sea, and sick-
ness sets in. He cries out :
"Sooner shall earth resolve itself to sea,
Than I resign thine image, oh, my fair!...
(Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew

sea-sick.).

Sooner shall heaven kiss earth (here he

fell sicker.)

Oh Julia! what is every other woe ?
(For God's sake let me have a glass of

comes out of his hands, as rumpled as any other woman. She is virtuous, of course; and what is better still, she desires to be so. She plies herself, in connection with Don Juan, with the finest arguments; what a fine thing are arguments, and how suited they are to check passion! Nothing can be more solid than a firm purpose, propped up by logic, resting on the fear of the world, the thought of God, the recollection of duty; nothing can prevail against it, except a tête-à-tête in June, on a moonlight evening. At last the deed is done, and the poor timid lady is surprised by her outraged husband; in what a situation! Let us look again at the book. Of course she will be speechless, ashamed and full of tears, and the moral reader duly reckons on her remorse. My dear reader, you have not reckoned on impulse and nerves. To-morrow she will feel shame; the business is now to overwhelm the husband, to deafen him, to Many other things cause the death of

confound him, to save Juan, to save herself, to fight. The war 'once begun, is waged with all kinds of weapons, and chiefly with audacity and insults. The only idea is the present need, and this absorbs all others; it is in this that woman is a woman. This Julia cries lustily. It is a regular storm: hard words and recriminations, mockery and challenges, fainting and tears. In a quarter of an hour she has gained twenty years' experience. You did not know, nor she either, what an actress can emerge, all on a sudden, unforeseen, out of a simple woman. Do you know what can emerge from yourself? You think yourself rational, humane; I admit it for to-day; you have dined, and you are comfortable in a pleasant 100m. Your human mechanism works without getting to disorder, because the wheels are oiled and well regulated; but place it in a shipwreck, a battle, let the failing or the plethora of blood for an instant derange the chief pieces, ar d we shall see you howling or drivelling like a madman or an idiot. Civilization, education, reason, health, cloak us in their smooth and polished cases; let us tear them away one by one, or all

liquor;

Pedro, Battista, help me down below.)
Julia, my love!-(You rascal, Pedro, quick

er)

Oh, Julia!-(this curst vessel pitches so)
Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!
(Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)..
Love's a capricious power.
Against all noble maladies he's bold,
But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet;...
Shrinks from the application of hot towels,
And purgatives are dangerous to his reign,
Sea-sickness death." *

Love:

..

We see clearly that he is a ways the
same, going to extremes and unhappy,
bent on destroying himself. His Don
Juan, also, is a debauchery; in it he
diverts himself outrageously at the ex-
pense of all respectable things, as a
bull in a china shop. He is always
violent, and often ferocious; a sombre
imagination intersperses his love stories
with horrors leisurely enjoyed, the des-
pair and famine of shipwrecked men,
and the emaciation of the raging skele-
tons feeding on each other. He laughs
at it horribly, like Swift; he jests over
it 1 ke Voltaire :

'And next they thought upon the master's
mate,
As fattest; but he saved himself, because,
Besides being much averse from such a fate,
There were some other reasons: the first
He had been rather indisposed of late;
And that which chiefly proved his saving

was,

clause,

Was a small present made to him at Cadiz,
By general subscription of the ladies." *

poetry? Of the divine mantle, the last
garment which a poet respects, he
makes a rag to trample upon, to wring,
to make holes in, out of sheer wanton-
ness. At the most touching moment
of Haidée's love he vents a buffoonery
He concludes an ode with caricatures
He is Faust in the first verse, and
Mephistopheles in the second. He
employs, in the midst of tenderness
of murder, penny-print witticisms, triv
ialities, gossip, with a pamphleteer's
vilification and a buffoon's whimsicali-
ties. He lays bare the poetic method,
asks himself where he has got to,
counts the stanzas already done, jokes
the Muse, Pegasus, and the whole epic
stud, as though he wouldn't give two-
pence for them. Again, what remains ?
Himself, he alone, standing amidst ali
this ruin. It is he who speaks here;
his characters are but screens; half the
time even he pushes them aside, to
occupy the stage. He lavishes upon
us his opinions, recollections, anger,
tastes; his poem is a conversation, a
confidence, with the ups and downs, the
rudeness and freedom of a conversa-
tion and a confidence, almost like the
holographic journal, in which, by night,
at his writing-table, he opened his heart
and discharged his feelings. Never
was seen in such a clear glass the birth
of lively thought, the tumult of great
genius, the inner life of a genuine poet,
always impassioned, inexhaustibly fer-
tile and creative, in whom suddenly,
successively, finished and adorned,

With his specimens in hand, † Byron follows with a surgeon's exactness all the stages of death, gorging, rage, madness, howling, exhaustion, stupor; he wishes to touch and exhibit the naked and ascertained truth, the last grotesque and hideous element of humanity. Let us read again the assault on Ismail, --the grape-shot and the bayonet, the street massacres, the corpses used as fascines, and the thirty-eight thousand slaughtered Turks. There is blood enough to satiate a tiger, and this blood flows amidst an accompaniment of bloomed all human emotions and ideas, jests; it is in order to rail at war, and -sad, gay, lofty, low, hustling one anthe butcheries dignified with the name other, mutually impeding one another of exploits. In this pitiless and uni- like swarms of insects who go hum versal demolition of all human vanities, what remains? What do we know except that life is "a scene of all con- | less'd inanity," and that men are,

Dogs, or men !-for I flatter you in saying
That ye are dogs-your betters far-ye may
Read, or read not, what I am now essaying
To show ye what ye are in every way?"

What does he find in science but defi-
ciencies, and in religion but mummer.
ies?§ Does he so much as preserve

* Pyron's Works, xv.; Don Juan, c. ii. st. Ixxxi.

+ Byron had before him a dozen authentic descriptions.

Byren's Works, xvi.; Don Juan, c. vii.
See his Vision of Judgment.

ming and feeding on flowers and in the mud. He may say what he likes; wil lingly or unwillingly we listen to him; let him leap from sublime to burlesque, we leap with him. He has so much wit, so fresh a wit, so sudden, so bit ing, such a prodigality of knowledge, ideas, images picked up from the four corners of the horizon, in heaps and masses, that we are captivated, trans ported beyond all limits; we cannot dream of resisting. Too vigor rus, and hence unbridled, that is the word which ever recurs when we speak of Byron; too vigorous against other and himself, and so unbridled, that

after spending his life in setting the world at defiance, and his poetry in depicting revolt, he can only find the fulfilment of his talent and the satisfaction of his heart, in a poem waging war on all human and poetic conventions. When a man lives in such a manner he must be great, but he be comes also morbid. There is a malady of heart and mind in the style of Don Juan, as in Swift. When a man jests amidst his tears, it is because he has a poisoned imagination. This kind of laughter is a spasm, and we see in one man a hardening of the heart, or madness in another, excitement or disgust. Byron was exhausted, at least the poet was exhausted in him. The last cantos of Don Juan drag: the gayety became forced, the escapades became digressions; the reader began to be bored. A new kind of poetry, which he had attempted, had given way in his hands: in the drama he only attained to powerful declamation, his characters had no life; when he forsook poetry, poetry forsook him; he went to Greece in search of action, and only found death.

VI.

So lived and so died this unhappy great man; the malady of the age had no more distinguished prey. Around him, like a hecatomb, lie the others, wounded also by the greatness of their faculties and their immoderate desires, -some ending in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by pleasure or work; these driven to madness or suide; those beaten down by impotence, οι lying on a sick-bed; all agitated by their too acute or aching nerves; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age, the happiest having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their century, and we stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of their cries. We were sad like them, and like them inclined to revolt. The reign of democracy excited our ambitions without satisfying them; the proclamation of philosophy kindled our curiosity without satisfying it. In this wide-open career, the plebeian suffered for his mediocrity, and the

skeptic for his doubt. The plebeian, like the skeptic, attacked by a preco cious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience, abandoned his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society illarranged, man abortive or marred. From this unison of voices an idea arose, the centre of the literature, the arts, the religion of the age, to wit, that there is a monstrous disproportion between the different parts of our social structure, and that human destiny is vitiated by this disagreement.

What advice have they given us to cure this? They were great; were they wise? "Let deep and strong sensations rain upon you; if the human mechanism breaks, so much the worse!" "Cultivate your garden, bury yourself in a little circle, re-enter the flock, be a beast of burden." "Turn believer again, take holy water, abandon your mind to dogmas, and your conduct t manuals of devotion." "Make your way; aspire to power, honors, wealth." Such are the various replies of artists and citizens, Christians and men of the world. Are they replies? And what do they propose but to satiate one's self, to become stupid, to turn aside, to forget? There is another and a deeper answer, which Goethe was the first to give, the truth of which we begin to conceive, in which issue all the labor and experience of the age, and which may perhaps be the subject-matter of future literature: "Try to understand yourself, and things in general." A strange reply, which seems hardly new, whose scope we shall only hereafter discover. For a long time yet men will feel their sympathies thrill at the sound of the sobs of their great poets. For a long time they will rage against a destiny which opens to their aspirations the career of limitless space, to shatter them, within two steps of the goal, against a wretched post which they had not seen. For a long time they will bear like fetters the necessities which they ought to have embraced as laws. Our generation, like the preceding, has been tainted by the malady of the age, and will never more than half get rid of it. We shall arrive at truth, not at tranquillity. All