schoolboy, interest and enchant him. Macaulay, among the liberal items of knowledge with which he supplied the "fourthform schoolboy," gave him credit for an acquaintance with the Domdaniel cavern. This intimacy, when begun so early, is closer than it will again be found in after-life. Arabian heroes like Thalaba who fight with terrible enchanters, Indian families surrounded, as in The Curse of Kehama, by the supernatural spells of an intricate mythology, Welshmen like Madoc who visit Mexico in the twelfth century, even the Gothic Roderick in the midst of his crimes and punishment, need something more than correct detail to make their appeal to the older student. The quality which is wanting in all Southey's more ambitious work is the essential quality of poetry; and it was precisely his freedom from this necessary equipment of the poet that made him so good a prose writer. The percentage of people who read Southey's poetry at all is very small. Everybody has heard of Blenheim, if only through the medium of a book of selections, and most people who have read Byron's Vision of Judgment know that Southey beatified the memory of George III in indifferent hexameters and a style of adulation of which no other Laureate, however imbecile, had been guilty. The decline of a poet who never commanded great popularity is only to be expected. Coleridge said of The Curse of Kehama that it was a work" of great talent, but not of much genius"; and this is the exact explanation of its author's later obscurity. On the other hand, this great talent was quite enough for the Life of Nelson. That admirable little book, the model of biography where it assumes the form of narrative, has become a national possession which no more critical life of the great hero can supersede. The History of Brazil is seldom consulted, while the History of the Peninsular War is superfluous beside Napier's; the Life of Wesley and The Book of the Church have a controversial bitterness which sits ill on them, and has destroyed their reputation, but they are both masterpieces of their kind; while in The Doctor and the Table-Talk we catch the vigorous reflection of Southey's mind and scholarly humour. However, if the stigma of Service of his scholar- inferiority must rest upon Southey, if his name survives chiefly because he was the friend of Wordsliterature. worth and the brother-in-law of Coleridge, if it is a name which has the doubtful honour of being universally known while its legitimate claim to reputation is generally forgotten, it must be remembered that Southey did a quiet service to the romantic movement, not merely in his minor poems-occasional lyrics like "My days among the Dead are passed "—but in his study and translation of the medieval romances. Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin of England find, it may be, a scanty public and a sympathy not much greater than they found from Don Quixote's housekeeper and the curate; but they were Contrast between his poetry and prose. ship to definite and valuable contributions to that enlargement of medieval scholarship which was going on in England at this time; and the Chronicle of the Cid, while there are very few translations as good, is one of those books which, like Scott's Border Minstrelsy and Lamb's Dramatic Poets, are the classic monuments of the sound learning that attended on the spread of the romantic movement and increased its magic influence by their scholarly testimony. CHAPTER XXII. THE POETS OF THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. II. BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATS, ETC. § 1. Life of LORD BYRON. § 2. His early work: its popularity and revolutionary influence. § 3. Byron's satires: English Bards; Beppo; The Vision of Judgment; Don Juan. § 4 His dramas. Summary of characteristics. § 5. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: his life. § 6. His lyric genius; influence of scholarship on his work; methods of appreciating Shelley. §7. JOHN KEATS. Life. § 8. Contrast with Shelley; peculiar character of Keats' poetry; its place in the pedigree of verse. $9. Life of THOMAS MOORE. § 10. Classification of his poetry. § IL SAMUEL ROGERS and THOMAS CAMPBELL. Unprogressive character of their work. LORD § 1. EVEN in our own day, when the general knowledge of English literature is so much wider than it ever has been, there survives in the rest of Europe a tradition that Byron was the greatest poet of the romantic movement. (1788-1824). It is well known that his sudden popularity effaced Scott's claims to this reputation and lasted, in spite of scandal, until his death; that his romantic life, his wild adventures, and his gallant self-sacrifice in the cause of Greek independence, have given his poetry additional glory; and that his influence upon the Continent is still almost as great as it was half a century and more ago. GEORGE GORDON NOEL, sixth LORD BYRON, was born in Holles Street, Cavendish Square, on January 22, 1788. His father, a nephew Parentage of the fifth Lord, was an army captain and an unprincipled profligate, who had married a Scotch heiress, Catherine Gordon of Gicht. This lady, Captain Byron's second wife, was the mother of the poet. Her temper was passionate and uncontrolled, her caprices so violent and sudden as to reach the limit of insanity; when she lost her temper she railed like a fishwife and chased her son, whom she had been caressing a moment before, round the room; she addressed him on one occasion as a "lame beast," and, in a quarrel, threw the poker and tongs at him. Her death was eventually caused by her rage at an upholsterer's bill. It is obvious that Byron's early surroundings were of a very unfortunate kind. His father had dissipated the fortune which and childhood. Life in Nottinghamshire, at Harrow, and at Cambridge. Miss Gordon had brought him, and she was obliged to retire to a lodging in Aberdeen, where she maintained herself and her son on an income of £150. Thus Byron was left entirely to her control. He inherited from her an almost morbid susceptibility, which was aggravated by her alternate fondling and abuse; and it seems that, during the first ten years of his life, the only antidote to his mother's hysterical mismanagement was supplied by his nurse, May Gray. His beauty as a boy was remarkable; his head with its curly hair and magnificent profile was one which sculptors loved to model; but, from his birth, he had a serious malformation in one of his feet which precluded him from walking any distance, and, although he managed to conceal it from obvious notice, enormously increased his painful self-consciousness. During these years he went to school at Aberdeen, first with a private tutor, afterwards at the grammar school of the city. His father died at Valenciennes in 1791, not without suspicion of suicide; his cousin, the heir to the Byron peerage, died in 1794, leaving him the succession. In 1798 the death of the "wicked Lord Byron" brought him the title and the family mansion at Newstead. He became a ward in chancery and was placed under the guardianship of Lord Carlisle. Newstead was in a dilapidated condition and the property was heavily encumbered. Mrs. Byron accordingly went to live in Nottingham and engaged a private tutor for her son, whom she sent in the next year to a school at Dulwich. Eventually, in 1801, he went to Harrow and stayed there for four years. Although recourse to quacks and physicians had made his foot worse instead of better, he distinguished himself in athletic exercises, played cricket against Eton, and learned to swim. His revolutionary spirit was shown in the childish mutiny in which he took part after the election of Dr. Butler to the head-mastership. His friendships were violent and romantic, and he had declared his love for three of his cousins before he left Harrow. For one of them, Mary Anne Chaworth, who was married in 1805 to a Nottinghamshire squire called Musters, he retained a somewhat factitious affection, but the lady seems never to have returned his passion. This affaire de cœur went on during his holidays in Nottinghamshire, spent sometimes at Newstead, which had been taken for the time by Lord Grey de Ruthin, and, from 1804 to 1807, at the charming country town of Southwell. Burgage Manor, on the slopes which overlook the town, became his home for three years. He made a number of friends, but did not mix very much in the county society, preferring the company of Becher, one of the priest-vicars of Southwell Minster, and of a young medical student named Pigot, for whose sister he conceived a desultory fancy. Meanwhile he had left Harrow-which he had hated at first-with great regret, and had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he made his mark as an eccentric, formed several friendships, including his lifelong association with John Cam Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, and distinguished himself by posing as an atheist and by several juvenile freaks. His first volume of poetry was published by a Newark bookseller named Ridge, in 1806. Becher criticised one of the pieces unfavourably. Byron recalled and burned all the copies of the edition on which he could lay his hands, and set to work at a revision. An intermediate edition appeared early in 1807; but, in its final form, published in the summer, the book was called Hours of Idleness and bore its author's name. This little book of autobiographical verses-for the most part reminiscences of Nottinghamshire, Harrow, and Cambridge"Hours of wanted poetical value, but was no worse than the Idleness' juvenile productions of most poets. However, The (1807) and Edinburgh Review, probably attracted to the work of its sequel. destruction by the writer's rank, published a scathing criticism of the book. The critic was almost certainly Brougham, who was then studying for the English bar in London. While the judgment of the Edinburgh was quite correct in essentials, its incidental violence was unpardonable, and the personal injury which it inflicted upon Byron had a lasting result on his character. This was in January, 1808. In the same year he took his Master's degree at Cambridge and went to live at Newstead, vaunting his cynicism and scandalising the countryside by his house-parties of college friends and by puerile orgies which obtained a reputation more serious than the fact. His misanthropy was increased by the coldness with which, on coming of age, he was received in the House of Lords. His guardian, Lord Carlisle, shrank from introducing him, and he was accompanied to the House only by an obscure family connection named Dallas, who was a would-be poet. This accumulation of circumstances made him an Ishmael. In March, 1809, appeared his very clever satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a hybrid imitation of Juvenal and Pope, in which he attacked not only his guardian and his critical aggressors, but almost all the literary men of the day, including the generous Scott. In July the young satirist, accompanied by Hobhouse, went on his travels, and remained abroad for almost exactly two " English Bards and (1809). Travels on the Continent. years. He visited Portugal and Spain, sailed from Gibraltar to Malta, where he met Mrs. Spencer Smith, the Florence of Childe Harold, and then, landing at Prevesa in September, spent the autumn and early winter in wandering through Acarnania and the Morea. He arrived at Athens on Christmas Eve and remained there for three months in the house of Madame Macri, whose daughter Theresa inspired the famous Maid of Athens. In March, 1810, he left Athens for the Troad; on May 3 he performed his famous achievement of swimming the Hellespont; from May 14 to July 14 he was at Constantinople; and then, after a temporary |