The self-same thing they will abhor
One way, and long another for.
Free-will they one way disavow,
Another, nothing else allow.
All piety consists therein

In them, in other men all sin.
Rather than fail, they will defy

That which they love most tenderly:

Quarrel with minc'd pies, and disparage

Their best and dearest friend — plum-porridge;

Fat pig and goose itself oppose,

And blaspheme custard through the nose.

His puissant sword unto his side,
Near his undaunted heart, was ty'd,
With basket-hilt, that would hold broth,
And serve for fight and dinner both.
In it he melted lead for bullets,

To shoot at foes, and sometimes pullets;
To whom he bore so fell a grutch,

He ne'er gave quarter t'any such.
The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty,
For want of fighting was grown rusty,
And ate into itself, for lack

Of somebody to hew and hack.

The peaceful scabbard where it dwelt
The rancor of its edge had felt.

This sword a dagger had, his page,

That was but little for his age:
And therefore waited on him so,
As dwarfs upon knights-errant do.
It was a serviceable dudgeon,
Either for fighting or for drudging:
When it had stabb'd, or broke a head,
It would scrape trenchers or chip bread,
Toast cheese or bacon, though it were
To bait a mouse-trap, 'twould not care:
'Twould make clean shoes, and in the earth
Set leeks and onions, and so forth:
It had been 'prentice to a brewer,
Where this, and more, it did endure;
But left the trade, as many more
Have lately done, on the same score.

LORD BYRON

(1788-1824)

BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

OETHE, in one of his conversations with Henry Crabb Robinson about Byron, said "There is no padding in his poetry" ("Es sind keine Flickwörter im Gedichte"). This was in 1829, five years after Byron died. "This, and indeed every evening, I believe, Lord Byron was the subject of his praise. He compared the brilliancy and clearness of his style to a metal wire drawn through a steel plate." He expressed regret that Byron should not have lived to execute his vocation, which he said was "to dramatize the Old Testament. What a subject under his hands would the Tower of Babel have been!" Byron's views of nature he declared were "equally profound and poetical." Power in all its forms Goethe had respect for, and he was captivated by the indomitable spirit of Manfred. He enjoyed the Vision of Judgment' when it was read to him, exclaiming "Heavenly!» «Unsurpassable!" "Byron has surpassed himself." He equally enjoyed the satire on George IV. He did not praise Milton with the warmth with which he eulogized Byron, of whom he said that "the like would never come again; he was inimitable."

Goethe's was the Continental opinion, but it was heightened by his conception of "realism"; he held that the poet must be matterof-fact, and that it was the truth and reality that made writing popular: "It is by the laborious collection of facts that even a poetical view of nature is to be corrected and authenticated." Tennyson was equally careful for scientific accuracy in regard to all the phenomena of nature. Byron had not scientific accuracy, but with his objectivity Goethe sympathized more than with the reflection and introspection of Wordsworth.

Byron was hailed on the Continent as a poet of power, and the judgment of him was not influenced by his disregard of the society conventions of England, nor by his personal eccentricities, nor because he was not approved by the Tory party and the Tory writers. Perhaps unconsciously-certainly not with the conviction of Shelley - Byron was on the side of the new movement in Europe; the spirit of Rousseau, the unrest of Wilhelm Meister,' the revolutionary seething, with its tinge of morbidness and misanthropy, its brilliant dreams of a new humanity, and its reckless destructive

theories. In France especially his influence was profound and lasting. His wit and his lyric fire excused his morbidness and his sentimental posing as a waif, unfriended in a cold and treacherous world of women and men; and his genius made misanthropy and personal recklessness a fashion. The world took his posing seriously and his grievances to heart, sighed with him, copied his dress, tried to imitate his adventures, many of them imaginary, and accepted him as a perturbed, storm-tost spirit, representative of an age of agitation.

So he was, but not by consistent hypocritical premeditation; for his pose was not so much of set purpose as in obedience to a false education, an undisciplined temper, and a changing mind. He was guided by the impulse of the moment. I think it a supportable thesis that every age, every wide and popular movement, finds its supreme expression in a Poet. Byron was the mouthpiece of a certain phase of his time. He expressed it, and the expression remains and is important as a record, like the French Revolution and the battle of Waterloo. Whatever the judgment in history may be of the value to civilization of this eighteenth-century movement extending into the nineteenth, in politics, sociology, literature, with all its recklessness, morbidness, hopefulness, Byron represented it. He was the poet of Revolt. He sounded the note of intemperate, unconsidered defiance in the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.' This satire was audacious; many of its judgments were unjust; but its wit and poetic vigor announced a new force in English literature, and the appearance of a man who was abundantly able to take care of himself and secure respectful treatment. In moments afterward he expressed regret for it, or for portions of it, and would have liked to soften its personalities. He was always susceptible to kindness, and easily won by the good opinion of even a declared enemy. He and Moore became lifelong friends, and between him and Walter Scott there sprang up a warm friendship, with sincere reciprocal admiration of each other's works. Only on politics and religion did they disagree, but Scott thought Byron's Liberalism not very deep: "It appeared to me," he said, "that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit of thinking. At heart I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle." Scott shared Goethe's opinion of Byron's genius: -"He wrote from impulse, never for effect, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. We have many men of high poetic talents, but none of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters.” It has been a fashion of late years to say that both Byron and Scott have gone by; I fancy it is a case of "not lost, but gone before." Among the men satirized