clusions which can find no remedy against the world's ills save the extinction of the desire for existence itself. He passionately desires individual life, he stands for immortality.

"'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant

'Tis life, not death, for which we pant;
More life and fuller that I want ";

and since he is thus the natural man, loving life and hating death, he occupies a strong place with superior forces from which the philosophers will find it difficult to dislodge him.

In Childe Harold Byron attempted the personal epic. The fire and passion, the rebellious and tempestuous spirit abroad in it carried the poem far on the pathway to complete success. But Byron too, like Scott, fell, one might say, in the moment of victory. Like Scott he had great gifts and great opportunity. No poet since Shakespeare's day wrote English with more continuous ease, more consummate freedom, more fluent power or richer variety. But how careless, how often undistinguished, unharmonious, even ungrammatical. "On taking up a fairly good version of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in French or Italian prose," said Swinburne, a reader whose eyes and ears are not hopelessly sealed against all distinction of good from bad in rhythm or in style will infallibly be struck by the vast improvement which the text has undergone in the course of translation. The blundering, floundering, lumbering, and stumbling stanzas, transmuted into prose and transfigured into grammar, reveal the real and latent force of rhetorical energy that is in them: the gasping, ranting, wheezing, broken-winded verse has been transformed into really effective and fluent oratory. .. It is impossible to express how much Childe Harold gains by being done out of wretchedly bad metre into decently good prose: the New Testament did not gain more by being translated out of canine Greek into divine English.'

Byron's first intention in Childe Harold was a poem in the manner of Ariosto, mingling the grave with the vicious outlook, and permitting himself within a few lines a transition from the serious to the comic aspect. But the few attempts made in the early cantos to introduce the jesting tone were not successful,

and soon abandoned. Nevertheless it was in comic epic that Byron finally and completely found himself. He made several discoveries-the first a discovery of the highest importance that, as Moore said, “It is far easier to rise with grace from the level of a strain generally familiar, into an occasional short burst of pathos or splendour, than to interrupt thus a prolonged tone of solemnity by any descent into the ludicrous." Beppo was a preliminary trial in a style brought to perfection in what must, when all deductions are made, be regarded as Byron's greatest achievement, Don Juan. Though Italy invented the burlesque romance, he owed most, perhaps, to his brilliant English predecessor, John Hookham Frere, who, in The Monks and the Giants, published in 1817, added a new kind of narrative to our poetical literature, a kind which to readers unacquainted with Italian, perfectly displays the ease and vivacity, the ironical humour and polished ridicule of Pulci and Berni.1

Though eclipsed by his great successor, Frere deserves remembrance. His work not only enters history, it should live as literature. No detached passage, more especially of a narrative poem, can display its full excellence, but the pleasant vein of The Monks and the Giants must at least be represented, however briefly. Here is the description of Sir Tristram, the darling of the romancers

Songs, music, languages and many a lay
Asturian or Armoric, Irish, Basque,
His ready memory seized and bore away;
And ever when the ladies chose to ask,
Sir Tristram was prepared to sing and play,
Not like a minstrel earnest at his task,
But with a sportive, careless, easy style,
As if he seemed to mock himself the while.

His ready wit and rambling education,

With the congenial influence of his stars,
Had taught him all the arts of conversation,
All games of skill and stratagems of wars;
His birth, it seems, by Merlin's calculation,
Was under Venus, Mercury and Mars
Somewhat more learned than became a knight,
It was reported he could read and write."

1 The Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians. Quarterly Review, April 1819. Whistlecraft (J. H. Frere), said Byron, speaking of Beppo, is my immediate model, but Berni is the father of that kind of writing; which, I think, suits our language, too, very well."

In this metre and style Byron wrote Don Juan, an epic in the modern manner, probably the only manner in which the taste of latter days would willingly accept it.

My poem's epic, and is meant to be

Divided in twelve books; each book containing,

With love, and war, a heavy gale at sea,1

A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning,
New characters; the episodes are three:

A panoramic view of hell's in training,
After the style of Virgil and of Homer,
So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.

All these things will be specified in time,
With strict regard to Aristotle's rules,
The Vade Mecum of the true sublime,

Which makes so many poets, and some fools:
Prose poets like blank-verse, I'm fond of rhyme,
Good workmen never quarrel with their tools;
I've got new mythological machinery,

And very handsome supernatural scenery."

As a poem Don Juan violates all the canons, is without middlepoint or end, and could never have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. To its hero, destitute of heroic qualities, Byron himself was perfectly indifferent, and was even prepared to guillotine him to bring about a finish. Without form and void, the whole composition is a patchwork of irrelevancies. The author passes through half a dozen moods in half a dozen stanzas, tragedy and comedy are inextricably mingled. There is no apparent purpose, no design, no connection between the parts. It has been called the "Odyssey of Immorality," scandalised a large proportion of its readers, and so offended the taste of the Countess Guiccioli, Byron's mistress, that she implored him to discontinue it after the first few cantos. Yet it can never be dethroned from its place among the glories of

1" For your tempest, take Eurus, Zephyr, Auster, and Boreas, and cast them together in one verse: add to these, of rain, lightning and thunder (the loudest you can) quantum sufficit. Mix your clouds and billows well together till they foam, and thicken your description here and there with a quicksand. Brew your tempest well in your head, before you set it blowing. For a battle: pick a large quantity of images and descriptions from Homer's Iliad, with a spice or two of Virgil, and if there remain any overplus, you may lay them by for a skirmish. Season it well with similes, and it will make an excellent battle."-Swift, Recipe for an Epic Poem. 2" People are always advising me to write an epic. If you must have an epic there's Don Juan for you. Poor Juan shall be guillotined in

the French Revolution."-Byron's Letters.

our literature, fulfils, as Shelley said, " in a certain degree what I have long preached, the task of producing something wholly new and relative to this age and yet strikingly beautiful,” and its amazing poetic and humorous qualities apart, is above all a passionate and unsubduable charter of liberty. Whatever we deny, do not let us deny that Don Juan is a superb campaign in the sacred cause of human freedom. Like Blake, Byron was convinced that all law external to himself, all restrictions on liberty save those imposed by man's own nature, are torturing and intolerable. That as an individual he became the captive of his own appetites does not concern us. His significance lies in the fact that he declared for the inner as against the outer restraints

"I wish men to be free

As much from mobs as kings,-from you as me."

He dared to be himself, and when he drew the sword he flung away the scabbard. Those who require or desire an apology. for Don Juan may be reminded that it is a comic and a satirical poem, and claims the licence of satire and comedy. Add to the names of Aristophanes and Juvenal, of Boccaccio and Chaucer and Swift, the name of Byron, and one apology will suffice. Society's ineradicable habit of assuming an air of virtue so imposes upon us that we take the mask for the person, and it is no uncommon thing for the critics of society to be charged with the vices they expose. "What are your motives," asked a friend of Byron, " for painting nothing but scenes of vice and folly?" "To remove," he replied, "the cloak which the manners and maxims of society throw over their secret sins, and show them to the world as they really are."

The first two cantos of Don Juan appeared in July 1819, but so savage was the outcry that the author threw aside the work for a time, and two years elapsed before the succeeding three cantos were published. The fifth canto, he replied to some one who asked whether it concluded the poem, "is so far from being the last of Don Juan that it is hardly the beginning. I meant to take him the tour of Europe, with a proper mixture of siege, battle, and adventure, and to make him finish, as

Anacharsis Cloots, in the French Revolution. To how many cantos this may extend, I know not, nor whether (even if I live) I shall complete it, but this was my notion. I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy, and a cause for a divorce in England, and a sentimental 'Werther-faced man' in Germany, so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of these countries. . . . But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in hell or in an unhappy marriage; not knowing which would be the severest: the Spanish tradition says hell, but it is probably only an allegory of the other state.”

Turn from the ethical to the poetical aspect of Don Juan, and he must be a very severe moralist who is not disarmed by its prodigious cleverness, a cleverness exhibited in the turn of its rhymes, like the famous

"But-Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual

Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?"

or in punning sarcasm—

"When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter'
And proved it-'twas no matter what he said ";

or in the witty juxtaposition of the serious and trivial—
"They griev'd for those who perish'd with the cutter,
And also for the biscuit casks and butter ";

or in unexpected snatches of literary criticism

"John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,

If not intelligible, without Greek

Contrived to talk about the Gods of late

Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate;

'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article."

Yet wit, though a capital relish, could hardly itself support the reader through fifteen cantos. Don Juan, make what deductions please you in respect of the predominance of rhetoric over poetry-and our very scrupulous modern taste seems to disapprove of rhetorical verse-reveals pure poetical quality in an infinitely higher degree than any other humorous poetry in English literature. Poetical feeling as a rule blends ill with worldly wisdom, it is true, yet in the second canto we have the

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